A rare sighting of Eastern Tropical Pacific orcas off Southern California on Monday revealed that these sleek and robust mammals are incredibly curious and boat friendly.
The accompanying aerial footage, captured by Ryan Lawler of Newport Coastal Adventure, shows two orcas approaching his company’s passenger vessel, diving beneath the boat and swimming in lead positions beneath the bow.
“The boat in the video is 36 feet long. So I think that larger killer whale is at least 20 feet,” Lawler told For The Win Outdoors.”
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A third orca appears briefly toward the end of the footage. They were part of a pod that grew to at least 10 throughout a day in which the mammals were spotted off northern San Diego County and southern Orange County.
Eastern Tropical Pacific killer whales (ETPs) spend most of their time off Mexico and Central America, but visits to Southern California have become more common over the past decade.
On Monday they were actively preying on dolphins, which explains the reason for their visit. But they seemed to take time to approach several whale-watching boats in their midst, in some cases surfing in wakes created by boats.
“They do that a lot more than the transient orcas we normally see,” Alisa Schulman-Janiger, an orca researcher, told For The Win Outdoors. “It’s almost a thing with them.”
In September of 2015, ETPs were caught on video following a boat at high speed off San Diego. They’ve been known to surf boat wakes in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, and last spring ETP killer whales paid scuba divers a face-to-face visit off Cabo San Lucas, at Baja California’s tip.
Schulman-Janiger said that based on eye-patch and other markings, at least three of the ETP orcas spotted Monday were seen in previous years in the same region.
The accompanying images were captured Monday by Lauren Turley, a deckhand-naturalist for Oceanside Adventures. It was Turley’s first-ever orca sighting – an experience she won’t soon forget.
–Video courtesy of Newport Coastal Adventure; images courtesy of Oceanside Adventures
