A photographer using a drone has captured extraordinary footage of killer whales eating a live shark at sea.
Slater Moore, who works with the Monterey Bay Whale Watch company in northern California, was on board a tourist boat that found two pods of offshore orcas, or killer whales, each with about half a dozen members, after a tip-off from fishermen last week.
After some time observing them, Mr Moore was beginning to lose interest. “I was actually about to bring my drone in when we saw a bubble blast — a bunch of bubbles coming up to the surface,” he told The Washington Post. “The next thing you know, a killer whale comes up with a shark in its mouth.”
His four-minute aerial video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on social media. It shows the killer whales, including calves, swimming close together, apparently passing the flailing sevengill shark between them.
Orcas typically eat under water but Katlyn Taylor, a marine biologist on the boat, thinks these ones kept returning to the surface “because the calves can’t hold their breath that long”.
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Deborah Giles, a director of the Centre for Whale Research in Washington State, said that the adult killer whales were probably teaching the younger ones.