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Even Orcinus orca whale play favorites , though not in a helpful way . Researchers have found the giant hunters in Antarctic waters favor Weddell seal as their preferred food .
And to take down a Weddell seal ( Leptonychotes weddellii ) , the whales make waves , the researchers observed .
A killer whale identifies a Weddell seal resting on an ice floe off the western Antarctic Peninsula. The whale will notify other killer whales in the area so they can coordinate a wave to wash the seal off the floe.
The science team monitoredkiller whaleshunting in frappe floes , off the westerly Antarctic Peninsula during January 2009 , finding they snubbed the more abundant crabeater seal in favor of the Weddells .
" These killer giant would identify and then attackWeddell sealsalmost solely , even though they made up only about 15 per centum of the usable seal universe , " enunciate study researcher Robert Pitman from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ’s ( NOAA ’s ) Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla , Calif. ( The team had identify 365 seals in the area . ) [ Read : Pitman Has Snowball Fight with Killer Whale ]
Here ’s how they made their kill : The whale , sometimes as many as seven alongside one another , would lodge the internal-combustion engine floe make a wave that either washed the seal off the ice or broke the chalk into smaller pieces that were then more vulnerable to another attack .
Killer whales generate a wave designed to knock the resting Weddell off an ice floe near the western Antarctic Peninsula.
Once the seal was washed off the ice , the killer whales make as a mathematical group to keep it from hauling onto the base hit of another ice floe . The whales seemed to render to confuse the seal by causing turbulence in the water with their tails and blowing bubbles under the water through their blowhole , the research worker pronounce .
Away from the ice , the whales attempted to tire and eventually swim the animal by overstretch it under urine by its hind flipper . finally the seal would yield to exhaustion and the Orcinus orca whale pod typically divvied up their catch underwater .
In most face , lilliputian of the cachet ’s corpse float to the open , but in one instance the carcass rise to the surface and appear to have been methodically skin and discerp before being use up , the team witness .
" Seal stay that we canvas from one of the kills allow for evidence of meticulous postmortem prey processing perhaps well termed ' slaughter , ' " Pitman and NOAA fellow worker John Durban write online March 1 in the journal Marine Mammal Science .
In total , the team note 14 Weddell seal attacks with 12 of those involving cooperative moving ridge - washing behavior to take down the prey . On ordinary , the whales created four " sea wolf waves " for each successful attack , which endure about 30 minutes .
Until now , killer whales make waves to wash away seals off methamphetamine floe in Antarctica had antecedently been observed only a fistful of times .
A previous cogitation involving the current researchers suggested this very distinctive killer whale universe , which they refer to as " pack ice grampus whale , " is a disjoined species .
