Orcas Caught on Video Tearing Apart Dolphin Next to Surfers
In the latest in a string of rare Southern California sightings, a pod of killer whales was seen traversing through a group of approximately 250 surfers in La Jolla, San Diego, in hot pursuit of a dolphin. And as the surfers watched on, the orcas eventually caught up to their prey, viciously ripping it apart.
Jake Halstead, a San Diego-based professional surfer turned coach, caught the scene on video, which he posted to Instagram this week. “Not everyday see a pod of orcas eat a dolphin then swim past a group of swimmers,” he captioned the two clips, apologizing for his language as he was “baffled.”
“There’s guys swimming! Look at the guy swimming, do you see him? There’s like 10 people swimming right there,” Halstead said in one clip, as another person off camera could be heard exclaiming, “f–k that s–t!” “Oh, I see a dolphin, it looks like they’re chasing a dolphin,” Halstead added.
“Oh my gosh, they’re right off the tip of the pier,” he narrates in the second video. “They’re eating a dolphin. They’re literally eating a dolphin.”
“I was pretty baffled on the whole experience,” Halstead later told Surfer.com. “I was doing my regular Sunday morning video review coaching and a lady walked by me and said the orcas are headed south from Blacks right now they should be here within five minutes. I was thinking, ‘Yeah right, I doubt I’ll see anything.’ Then exactly five minutes later they made their way in.”
“Pretty crazy experience to see on a Sunday morning,” he continued. “I had a lot of people comment and message me how scared they were for the swimmers, but they wanted nothing to do with them. They made their way through a crowd of 250 surfers to get to the two dolphins, so that should say a lot.”
Although killer whales sightings are typically rare in the area, a pod of 10 orcas including a calf just a few months old have been spotted between Oxnard and San Diego since at least mid-December. The mammals have been delighting whale watchers, sometimes leaping out of the water and coming right up to boats to say hello to humans.
Jessica Rodriguez, the education and communications manager at Newport Landing & Davey’s Locker Whale Watching, said that whale watching boats typically go on high alert throughout December and January. But even then, seeing so many orcas in the location is highly unusual.
“You’re normally going to see these types of killer whales in Mexico and South America,” Rodriguez recently told The Guardian. “Being able to see them off the coast of Orange County even just one time is rare, but multiple consecutive sightings over the course of two weeks is extremely rare.”
“They’re normally warm water killer whales, and they like to hang out in those warmer waters off the coast of Baja,” she added.
As far as why the killer whales are suddenly cropping up in Southern California, it’s possible that El Niño brought in warmer water conditions favorable to the creatures. Another theory is that they’ve concentrated due to an abundance of their main prey, bottlenose and common dolphin.
