I’d say the nickname “killer whale” is pretty accurate.
Orcas have really made a name for themselves in the past year. Until last year, the whales were seen as rather docile, and humans thought that we lived in unison with the massive 27-foot long, 13,000 pound sea creatures.
That is until they started attacking boats again and again, striking fear into anyone that took to the sea. We still don’t know if orcas are our friends, or if we’re on the menu, though we do know for sure that dolphins are a snack of choice for the killer whales.
The food chain in the ocean is a lot like the one on land. Larger creatures can generally impose their will on those that are smaller, and good like finding something bigger than a killer whale. They’ve been known to eat fish of all shapes and sizes, sharks, squids, dolphins, and even other whales (whale-ibalism).
In this extraordinary footage below, an orca whale was doing something that most humans are taught to never do: Playing with its food. An innocent dolphin was caught between a rock and a hard place, and though it was trying to be as elusive as possible, it couldn’t get away from the attacking killer whale.
The person filming the stunning encounter said the dolphin put up one heck of a fight, but ultimately lost in a battle with an orca, as detailed in the caption of the post:
“‘A Battle for the Skies’ is what happens when an orca takes on a Bottlenose Dolphin. Of all the predation events we’ve seen in the last month, this one was by far the most prolonged. It was the first time I sincerely wondered if the dolphin might get away. We counted at least 20 different impacts similar to this, but that dolphin simply would not quit!”
I’d have to imagine that the dolphin finally quit sometime after this happened. The bottle-nosed mammal took a huge hit to the gut from a killer whale head butt, which had to be some of the worst pain of the dolphin’s life (until it got eaten moments later).
It was a painful battle, though it did provide this wild video of a mid-air collision that’s definitely worth replaying 10-15 times:
