Although they spend their entire lives in the water, killer whales have a lot in common with humans. Research today shows that some can pull off the kinds of antics you’d expect to see in an episode Jackass.
For the first time, marine scientists have documented orcas (Orcinus orca) to poke into a dead fish and tear it to pieces. The mysterious behavior could be a sign of parental assistance among these killer whales or an example of these creatures having a good time.
“We suggest that this ram-to-cloth behavior may have multiple functions, including facilitating foraging or reflecting play behavior in young orcas,” the researchers wrote in their paper. has been published Thursday in Frontiers in Ethology.
An accidental discovery
Despite the nickname, orcas are actually a species of dolphin, although dolphins and whales are part of the same broad order of marine mammals called cetaceans.
Researchers, some of them nonprofit, are based in ocean conservation Beneath the Wavesthey didn’t want to discover a new kind of orca hijinks. They observed orcas killing sharp-tailed sunfish in the Gulf of California.Masturus lanceolatus). The sunfish is one of the largest and heaviest groups of bony fish, with some members reaching 11 feet in length and weighing up to 4,400 pounds.
The team noted that one female orca grabbed the sunfish by its tail fin, while another ran toward the two. The male fish then released the female sunfish before colliding, causing the carcass to explode like a meat piñata. More than a year later, in September 2025, a third party caught a similar incident in the Gulf of California on camera, again showing a killer whale clinging to a sunfish while another one crashed into it.
But why?
Researchers say the repeated and coordinated movement of these whales suggests that this is deliberate behavior. But there are still many questions about its nature.
Orcas cannot chew their food, so for larger prey they will tear off pieces that have been swallowed whole. The collision of killer whales can be used to cut a sunfish into more digestible pieces for the youngest members of the pod, like a parent cutting a steak for their offspring. Orcas have been is observed using complex group movements to break up their prey, then share these pieces with the rest of the pod (and even people). It should be noted that in the July 2024 incident, the juvenile whale in the group ate some of the small pieces of sunfish that flew away after the collision, while the adults ate the largest remnant of the intact body.
However, this may be an example of behavior instead of orcas literally playing with their food. Orcas have been observed doing other strange things with their prey to throw sea lions soar or stingrays bounce around like a soccer ball. Although these tricks can help them successfully capture their prey unharmed, sometimes they will do so without food their killing. Some scientists theorize that this play behavior is used to help young orcas learn to hunt or simply to socialize. And there may be other explanations for orca ramming.
Like humans, different populations and individual pods of cetaceans can have significant differences in behavior and communication patterns. These differences are socially transmitted, such as how people teach their young long-term customs and languages. Another interesting question is how widespread this tattooing behavior might be among orcas living in the Gulf of California or elsewhere, and whether it is specific to this particular predator species. Unfortunately, the researchers could not say whether the same pod was involved in both events they documented.
Whatever the explanation, researchers say, there’s still a lot we don’t know about killer whales — mysteries that will require better data to solve.
“This highlights the importance of obtaining high-quality dorsal fin and eyepatch images to better characterize individual and pod identification and feeding behavior,” the researchers said. “Ongoing photo-identification efforts in the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of California will help clarify the extent of dietary specialization among pods.”
In any case, it’s comforting to know that humans aren’t the only animals that sometimes behave strangely with their food. Now I wonder if orcas have ever tried to imitate walruses with the ocean’s version of french fries.
