Science

PUNCH HIM SO HARD HE EXPLODES!

God forbid someone has hobbies.

I love how you can hear the camera person yelling HOLY SHIT over and over again into their scuba mouthpiece

Everyone's so focused on the fish explosion but i think the coolest part of this is the orca holding it steady and then letting go, showing both cooperation and the ability to time things

why would a fish explode for fun? I think it was the blunt force trauma

ok you have activated my orca hyperfixation

They use a wide range of strategies to hunt and kill prey

While that's true when we're talking about orcas in general, each individual population only has one hunting strategy that they learn from the pod's matriarchs as juveniles and stick to for the rest of their life. "Orcas" may actually be a up to a dozen different subspecies or even species or at least clearly different populations that have not interbred for many thousands of years. These "ecotypes" of orcas all have distinct habitats, hunting strategies, prey animals, behaviors, group sizes and vocalizations, and they vary dramatically in size, coloration and patterning, and even fin and head shapes.

The orcas that are described here live in the Baya California and specialize in hunting sunfish. There's shark and ray hunters operating in tiny pods of less than a handful of individuals off the coast of South Africa, a population of very small, yellowish-grey orcas in Antarctica that form groups of hundreds of members to hunt penguins, a wide-roaming ("transient") population in the Northern Pacific that attacks seals and whale calfs in small pods, another gentically distinct ("resident") population in an overlapping area that hunts fish in pods of 20-30 members and sometimes cooperatively hunts with bubble-netting humpback whales that are extremely chill with them but show extreme hostility against the transient killer whales that do not dare to go near the residents because they aggressively defend themselves against these. And that does not even include the ecotypes that everybody knows for beaching themselves to hunt fur seals in Patagonia or the ecotype that swims in formation to generate floodwaves that wash sleeping seals in the antarctic off ice floes.

I was going to say they're not eating it so they clearly just did it for fun, but then an orca eats exactly 1 piece near the end

Knowing what i know about orcas that was probably the best tasting part of the sunfish, it's like ovaries or some freaky shit ofc orcas are into

The gelatinous layer that covers sunfish, known as the capsule, and their skin host a distinct microbiome. If this tissue is shattered, the microbial taxa inhabiting it are dispersed into the water, where they alter the nutrient composition. Tissue fragmentation could therefore facilitate contact between sunfish and orca microbiomes, which could provide nutritional or other benefits, such as immune regulation.

This was actually discovered by an Orca about five years back; Dr. Free Williamson PhD of marine biology noted that when some seals had been battering a nearby sunfish until it exploded, that the parts that were left behind had an interesting effect on his assistant, Dr. Free Williamson 2. Their advancements in marine biology have led to a form of reverse taxidermy exercises; they discovered if you apply sunfish once weekly that your gastrointestinal health improves markedly.

Need two big ladies to do this to me

Nobody writes an article about me when I do this.

The video in that link is absolutely crazy. It doesn't even make sense that an animal body would do that.

To shreds

jfc lmao

Holy shit that description is not an understatement.

Orcas of the North Star

wild