Videos show killer whales taking out great white sharks and eating their livers

Orcas in California off the coast of Mexico have been spotted hunting young white sharks in pride to grab them before eating their energy-filled livers, new research shows. The study, released on Sunday, suggests that this pod of orcas works by hunting sharks.

Great white sharks have only one known predator in the ocean: the orca, or Killer Whale. However, there is only one known known example, in South Africa in the year 2022, of animals focused on the jewel Great White Shark, so far.

Erick Higuera, a private marine biologist in Mexico, filmed a pod of five orcas in the Gulf of California hunting three great white sharks on two separate occasions.

In the first recorded hunt, which took place in August 2020, a group of five orcas worked together to push a young great white shark in the face.

Turning the shark upside down causes a condition called tonic instability, which paralyzes the shark after changing its awareness of its surroundings.

“This temporary situation renders the shark vulnerable, allowing the orcas to extract their rich liver again, before discarding other body parts,” said Higuera.

The orcas then take it underwater and resurface with the shark guts in their mouths. Not long after, the killer whales did the same to the great white shark.

In August 2022, a group of researchers recorded the same pattern – five orcas pressing a larger shark on its back and up to its face. Orcas have been seen eating shark livers.

“This behavior is evidence of advanced Orcas, strategic thinking, and good social learning, as hunting methods are passed down from generation to generation,” said Higuera.

According to the study, the researchers identified some of the Orcas in the first incident as having the pre-existing structure of other species such as whale sharks and bull sharks. However, the footage from the second hunt was not clear enough to determine if those orcas were not in the same lake.

Dr Salvador Jorgensen from the University of California, one of the authors of the study, said that these hunting incidents are the first time researchers have seen Orcas that double as white sharks.

“Older white sharks respond quickly to the predation of Orcas, completely migrating to their annual breeding grounds and not returning for months,” the publication said. “But these little white hunters may have nothing on orcas. We just don’t know if White Shark Anti-Preamer Anti-Predator Perforator responses are innate or need to be learned.”

The researchers suggested that although this is the only pod observed for hunting elasmobranchs, there could be many more.

“Generating information about the general feeding behavior of killer whales in this region will lead us to understand that their areas are important, so we can create their critical areas, so we can create lists to prevent people, so we can create strategies for prevention.

In the year 2022 in South AfricaA pod of Orcas was spotted chasing sharks during an hour-long pursuit in Mossel Bay, a port town in Port Western Cape.