ALPHAS: What is going on with Great White sharks and Orcas?!
In 2017, bodies started to wash up onshore in False Bay, South Africa. There were five of them; two female, three male… and all of them had their livers removed. It sounds like a new chapter in the Hannibal Lecter story, but the bodies belonged to great white sharks.
The livers had been, as reporters put it, ‘sucked out’. The biggest shark was 16 ft long, and yet, other than that one massive wound, they mostly only had a scrape or two. This didn’t look like a fair fight! So what was killing the most badass fish in the ocean? !
In Jaws, the boat Quint, Brody and Hooper take to hunt down the rogue shark is called the Orca, but early in Jaws II, the body of an orca washes up on the shore, covered in enormous bite marks from a great white shark. (Hello, symbolism)! But great white sharks have only been seen eating carcasses- we don’t know how the orcas died in the first place, and the truth is the other way around- orcas have been hunting and killing great white sharks since 1997… that we know of.
Orcas behave very differently depending on where they live. Some populations mostly eat fish, but some eat sea mammals- seals, whales and even other dolphins. And some- like the New Zealand orcas- have learned that if you flip a shark species (including rays) onto their backs, they go into a state like hypnosis. It’s known as ‘tonic immobility’, and it’s not very well studied! We don’t know if it happens to all shark species or why it might be useful, but it even affects great whites and tiger sharks.
New Zealand orcas turn themselves upside down, grab onto stingrays, then flip themselves the right way up, leaving the rays upside down in tonic immobility- easy prey! But rays are flat, without inch-long teeth and there have been no film franchises all about how scary they are… unlike the great white.
A picture shows the great white shark that washed ashore on a beach near Cape Town in South Africa. The shark was found after two killer whales were spotted hunting a great white around Seal Island, near Cape Town, on June 18 2023
Before October 1997, people thought that great white sharks had no natural predators. But then, this happened:
The Superfish: a whale watching cruise vessel full of passengers and naturalists with cameras was near the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco, when they got a call from a fishing boat- a fisherman had seen a pair of orcas eating a sea lion. Orcas are rare in the area, so the cruise boat changed course to see if the passengers could get a look. By the time they arrived, there was no trace of the sea lion but the orcas- a 20ft mother and her calf, half the size- were still around. And then a dark shape appeared in the water right by the boat- the one we see in movies all the time: a great white shark.
It headed toward the orcas and the mother orca veered off toward the shark. Someone filmed what happened next. The two disappeared under the water. Things were silent for a few long seconds, and then the orca appeared with the dead shark hanging out both sides of her mouth. Witnesses said she was parading the kill around by the boat, like a cat showing off a dead mouse. The shark’s carcass began to sink, but the liver rose to the surface and the mother orca gave it to her calf to eat.
Marine biologists on the boat were calling their colleagues with ‘get over here now’ messages. They might have been excited to see a new behaviour captured on camera, but the local great white shark population- about 100 sharks- were much less excited! They evacuated!, and for the rest of the season, the Farallon island area was empty of great white sharks. There was a 95% decline in sharks eating pinnipeds there (seals and sea lions) - and we don’t know where they went!
So, what is it about shark livers that Orcas want?!
Most bony fish have an organ called a ‘swim bladder’ that they can regulate to control their buoyancy. Sharks do not. Instead, its their huge fatty livers that keep them buoyant, and great white sharks livers have an energy density that’s even higher than whale blubber!! If whale blubber is coffee, shark liver is several cans of energy drink.
Orcas are incredibly dangerously smart. They’ve figured that out, and there are specialist shark killers emerging…
So, back to False Bay, and those dead great whites.
Around the time the bodies started to wash up, two of these shark specialists had been seen in the area. They’re both male, around twenty years old, and some think they’re brothers but this hasn’t been confirmed. The two are distinctive. Both have dorsal fins that have collapsed to the side, which happens in 90-100 percent of captive male orcas, but less than one percent of wild ones! One has fallen to the left, the other to the right, and the pair were named after these directions on a ship: Port and Starboard. They’ve been compared to London gangster twins The Krays, liver-eating serial killer Hannibal Lecter, and different scarred villains in movies around the world.
So far, their kill count (that we know about) has around fourteen great white sharks, and last February the two of them killed 17 broadnose sevengill sharks in just one day!!
Orcas usually hunt in groups and work as a team. In one Antarctic study, they had a 75% success rate hunting Weddell seals using wave washing- a team effort where they create waves to sweep seals into the water! But in March this year it looks like Starboard (who wasn’t part of that study) struck out alone. Witnesses said he ripped off the pectoral fin of a juvenile great white shark, and ‘eviscerated it’. The attack took less than two minutes.
The news went nuts! Reports of this never-before-seen behaviour were everywhere. A solo orca taking down a great white!
But this is where it gets a bit confusing…
In March this year, National Geographic aired a show called Queens, about the badass females of different species and their lives. Queens shows the 60 year old orca grandmother and pod leader Sophia slamming into a great white shark. The shark is stunned. It lies at the top of the ocean, as Sophia comes back and hits it again and again, killing it. But it took four years to film Queens, so did Starboard do it first, or did Sophia? Either way, both attacks were too confident to be a first time for the orcas!
Sharks do occasionally get away. In July 2017, an 11.5ft long great white shark was seen with what looks like scars from the bottom jaw of an orca, but still, when orcas arrive in an area, the sharks clear out and often stay away for an entire season- even as long as eighteen months! They usually don’t stand a chance against a pod of orcas and it looks like they know it.
So… hypothetical question… lets say you were a character in a modern shark movie, and you had a problem with a great white shark. What would you do? Maybe you’d bring out its only predator and pit them against each other. (After all, it worked in Megashark vs Giant Octopus, right?)
And that looks like the updated plot for the movie Alphas, which we’ve been promised since 2020 and teased with some awesome poster art and the tagline “fight to the depths”!
What could possibly go wrong…?
Words by Faith Roswell author of Movie Monsters of The Deep
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