Orcas filmed hunting a young shark (and eating its liver) with never-before-seen technique

A pod of orcas was filmed in the Gulf of California, off the coast of Mexico, hunting young great white sharks, turning them onto their backs to immobilize them before ripping out and eating their livers — a highly energetic organ.

According to a new report, published on Sunday in Frontiersa group of orcas developed a specialized technique to hunt juvenile great white sharks: flip them upside down to immobilize them.

Great white sharks have only one natural predator known: a orcaalso called killer whale. Until now, there was only one confirmed record, in South Africa, in 2022, of orcas attacking juvenile white sharks.

The Mexican marine biologist Erick Higuera captured aerial images of a group of five orcas hunting three great white sharkson two separate occasions, in the Gulf of California.

Already first documented huntin August 2020, five female orcas worked together to pushing a young great white shark to the surface and turn him over on his back.

Flipping a shark in this way causes a state called tonic immobilitywhich temporarily paralyzes him when change the perception that the animal has of your environment: basically, .

“This temporary state makes the shark defenselessallowing the orcas to extract their nutrient-rich liver and probably consume other organs before abandoning the rest of the carcass,” explained Higuera in a statement published on .

The orcas then dived with their prey, only to emerge again, with the shark’s liver in the mouth. Shortly afterwards, they repeated the same behavior with a second juvenile great white shark.

In August 2022, the research team recorded an identical pattern: five orcas, turning on their backs, and were observed feeding on its liver.

“This behavior demonstrates the advanced orca intelligencetheir strategic thinking and the sophisticated social learning they share within family groups — hunting techniques that are transmitted from generation to generation”, detailed Higuera.

According to the new study, some of the orcas observed in the first incident were identified as the same ones that had already been seen hunting species such as the whale shark and the bull shark. However, the images from the second hunt were not clear enough to confirm whether they belonged to the same group.

Salvador Jorgensenresearcher at California State University and co-author of the study, highlights that these are the first known observations of orcas repeatedly attacking juvenile great whites.

“Adult white sharks react immediately to the presence of orcas hunters, completely abandoning their areas seasonal aggregation and not returning for months”, explains the researcher.

“Unlike adult sharks, juveniles can be naive before the orcas. We still don’t know whether great white sharks’ escape responses are instinctive or need to be learned,” says Jorgensen.

“Orcas are hunting machines. They are like snipers – use specific hunting strategies, very specific depending on the prey”, notes Higuera. “These discoveries suggest that orcas belong to a group that feeds on sharks and that until now had not been recognized“, he concludes.