MAUI NUI, Hawaii – Cascadia Collective researchers caught a rare sight on camera, a false killer whale eating a fish.
The animal is called a false killer whale but is actually a species of dolphin. The animal got its name because the head is similarly shaped to that of a killer whale. They can grow to be 20 feet and dive more than 3,000 feet.
Cascadia Researcher Robin Baird, who took the picture, told ABC4 News, “Although we’ve been studying false killer whales for a long time, they are actually pretty hard to encounter. We’ve had some years with a couple of months of fieldwork where we may only see them once or twice in a year (and some years we’ve never found them despite a month or more of fieldwork). The population around the main Hawaiian Islands is small (the most recent estimate, from 2015, is 167 individuals), and most of those spend most of their time on the windward sides of the islands (the trade winds blow from the east to the west, and almost all the small boat research in Hawaii is on the west sides of the islands where it is relatively calm.”
Conducting a 16-day field research to study the foraging habits of the endangered false killer whale, the researchers were concentrating on photo ID’s and radio tagging the rare ocean mammal.
The researchers recorded what they say on their website were “several predation events on mahi-mahi.
Robin Baird added, “Over the years, we’ve satellite-tagged quite a few individuals so have been able to identify “hot spots,” and one of them is off the southwest side of Lāna‘i, the island where we are currently based. This is the fourth project we’ve done based on this island (2012, 2017, and 2018), and each project has just been 2-3 weeks, and we have had great success here. We’ve had four encounters this project (in the first 8 days – today is day 9 and the boat is out now), but in the four encounters, we had a lot of feeding on December 3rd (11 different predation events), but 3 the second day, and none the last two days. Although we see them catching mahi-mahi a lot (it is the most frequently recorded prey species in our study), often the glimpses are quick or at a distance. Of course, over the years, we’ve also improved the speed and quality of the cameras (and adding more video to the mix) to increase our chances of getting good images/videos of these types of events. A lot of things have to come together all at once!”
When the false killer whales hunt, the researchers say they rapidly accelerate and try to ram the fish or hit it with their tail. Cascadia researchers say the “leaping” behavior in the pictures happens both above and below the water.
