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As so-called “killer whales” have made news over the past few years for violent boat attacks in European waters, marine biologists have noticed a far sweeter behavior in Iceland’s frigid waves: the adoption of a baby whale from an entirely different species.
In interviews with Scientific American, scientists described their shock at observing a pilot whale calf that traveled with an Icelandic pod of orcas over a period of years.
One of those researchers, Chérine Baumgartner, said she and her colleagues at the Icelandic Orca Project initially couldn’t believe their eyes.
“At first, we were like, ‘Oh my god, this killer whale calf has a problem,'” the researcher said of the bulbous-headed baby she and her team first spotted back in 2022. It looked at first glance like a malformed orca — until they realized it was no killer whale at all.
The next day, when Baumgartner and her colleagues were witnessing the same pod again, the baby pilot whale was absent. Eventually, however, they started seeing baby pilot whales with orca pods throughout 2022 and 2023, and began to develop theories about what was happening.
In a new paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, Baumgartner and her team from a consortium of Nordic research institutions have posited three theories about the fascinating matchup: that the orcas are hunting the babies, playing with them, or perhaps even nurturing them.
As SciAm notes, each sighting involved a pilot whale calf that could be no more than a few weeks old that swam alongside an adult orca female in what marine biologists call “echelon position,” with the baby beside and slightly behind the elder.
In some instances, the baby pilot whale was nudged along by the adult orcas, and on another occasion, it swam ahead of the pod before the adults caught up to it and lifted it out of the water and onto one of their backs.
That kind of playful and protective behavior does not, of course, sound predatory — but because “killer whales” are known for their violence, it can’t be completely ruled out, the scientists say.
Along with what the orcas are doing with the baby pilot whales, researchers want to know how the two species, which generally do not overlap, came to not only be in the same place but also coexist in such a way.
“It could be,” Baumgartner told SciAm, “[that the orcas] encountered the pilot whale opportunistically, and some individuals played with the whale, and others tried to nurture it.”
As study co-author Filipa Samarra noted, there’s a chance that climate change has led pilot whales, which typically follow schools of warm water-seeking mackerel, into orca territory.
More on marine life: Scientists Take First Ever Video of Colossal Squid in the Wild… With One Comical Issue
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