orcas

Tokitae, a killer whale who has been in captivity for more than fifty years at the Miami Seaquarium, will be returning to her native waters in the Pacific Ocean’s Salish Sea. Tokitae, who is also known as Lolita, is the oldest killer whale in captivity at 57. She is about 7,000 pounds and 20 feet […]

Orcas are fearsome predators that have taken on everything from blue whales to great white sharks.  But one humpback whale named Valiant was able to turn the table on the aptly-named killer whales in an incident observed by whale watchers off of Canada’s Vancouver Island April 12.  “There’s something happening in front of us that […]

Killer whales truly deserve their name. They’ve been observed taking down everything from sea lions to great white sharks. And now, for the first time, they’ve been observed attacking and killing the largest animals on earth: blue whales.  Scientists writing in the journal Marine Mammal Science on January 21 recorded three incidents in which orcas […]

The great white sharks of South Africa had better watch out. Two orcas that have been known to hunt the apex predators were spotted Sunday in Cape Town’s False Bay. 

A rare orca stranding on Scotland’s Orkney Islands had a happy ending when volunteers and local residents teamed up to send the animal back out to sea. Conservation charity British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) led the operation, in a first for the organization. “Strandings of Orca do occur but are incredibly rare and it […]

The U.S. Navy has secured permission for exercises in the Pacific Northwest that could harm endangered orcas and other marine mammals. The new rule, published in the Federal Register Thursday, would allow the Navy to increase the number of Southern Resident killer whales it could “take”—or potentially harm—from two a year currently to 51 a […]

By Bob Jacobs Hanako, a female Asian elephant, lived in a tiny concrete enclosure at Japan’s Inokashira Park Zoo for more than 60 years, often in chains, with no stimulation. In the wild, elephants live in herds, with close family ties. Hanako was solitary for the last decade of her life. Kiska, a young female […]

Killer whales have been ramming yachts and boats off the coast of Northern Spain and researchers are puzzled by their behavior. In several attacks over the last couple of months, orcas have damaged boats and injured sailors, according to The Guardian. One sailor said that the attacks felt orchestrated, while another described it as if […]