Videos show orcas circling great white sharks and eating their livers

Orcas have been seen in the Gulf of California off the coast of Mexico hunting young great white sharks by turning them upside down to incapacitate them before eating their energetic liver, new research videos show. The research, published on Sunday, suggests that this group of orcas specializes in hunting sharks.

Great white sharks have only one known natural predator in the ocean: the killer whale. However, only one case has been recorded so far, in South Africa in 2022, of animals preying on juvenile great white sharks.

Erick Higuera, an independent marine biologist in Mexico, captured aerial images of a group 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 female orcas worked together to push the young great white shark to the surface and flip it over.

Turning a shark upside down induces a state called tonic immobility, which essentially paralyzes the shark after altering its awareness of its surroundings.

“This temporary state leaves the shark helpless, allowing the orcas to extract its nutrient-rich liver, and likely consume other organs as well, before abandoning the rest of the carcass,” Higuera said in a news release.

The killer whales then submerged him underwater and reappeared with the shark’s liver in their mouths. Shortly after, the orcas did the same with a second juvenile great white shark.

In August 2022, the research team recorded a similar pattern: five killer whales pushing a juvenile shark on their back and carrying it to the surface. The killer whales were seen eating the shark’s liver.

“This behavior is a testament to the advanced intelligence, strategic thinking and sophisticated social learning of orcas, as hunting techniques are passed down from generation to generation within their pods,” Higuera said.

According to the study, researchers identified some of the orcas in the first incident as those previously seen hunting other species such as whale sharks and bull sharks. However, the images from the second hunt were not clear enough to determine whether those orcas belonged to the same group.

Dr. Salvador Jorgensen of California State University, one of the study’s authors, said these hunting incidents are the first time researchers have seen killer whales repeatedly attack juvenile white sharks.

“Adult white sharks react quickly to orca hunting, completely evacuating their seasonal gathering areas and not returning for months,” he said in a news release. “But these juvenile white sharks may be naïve to orcas. We simply don’t know yet whether white sharks’ anti-predator flight responses are instinctive or need to be learned.”

The researchers suggested that while this is the only pod that has been observed hunting elasmobranchs, there could be more.

“Generating information about the extraordinary feeding behavior of killer whales in this region will lead us to understand where their main critical habitats are, so that we can create protected areas and implement management plans to mitigate human impact,” said Dr. Francesca Pancaldi of the National Polytechnic Institute Interdisciplinary Center for Marine Sciences.

In the 2022 instance in South Africaa pod of killer whales were seen chasing sharks during an hour-long chase off Mossel Bay, a port town in the southern Western Cape province.