VANCOUVER — Researchers from the University of British Columbia said they've identified a potentially new population of open-ocean orcas, which hunt the biggest predators on the planet.
VANCOUVER — Researchers from the University of British Columbia said they've identified a potentially new population of open-ocean orcas, which hunt the biggest predators on the planet.
It's the first time killer whales have been reported attacking sperm whales on the West Coast, he said. The study said the encounter that was witnessed with the sperm whales occurred in 1997 about 130 kilometres off the California coast. Many of the sperm whales in the pod were left with “extensive injuries," while one was killed, the study said.
McInnes said scientists collected a lot of photographs and data through these encounters, but they couldn’t match or recognize any of the orcas to other known killer whales in the northeastern Pacific. The report said researchers were able to identify the orcas as possibly a new group partially because of bite scars on their bodies from the cookiecutter shark, a species of parasitic sharks that lives in the deep ocean.
“But the big question is, where do these killer whales kind of fit in? We don't know ... but what we do know is that they represent a population that seems to spend more time in the open ocean,” McInnes said in an interview.
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