Some orcas have a taste for liver – specifically, the livers of great white sharks.
Videos taken by scientists in Mexico reveal how the crafty whales manage to snag bites of the apex predators’ fatty organs.
Researchers filmed two orca hunts in the Gulf of California – one in 2020 and another in 2022. They show the pods attacking young great white sharks by flipping them on their backsides to stun them, then slicing their sides open to extract their livers. The team published the findings of their video studies in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science on Monday.
In one of the videos, all members of the pod share the pink liver fat while the rest of the shark’s body sinks into the ocean’s depths. During the hunt, a sea lion lurks, seemingly trying to sneak away wiht a free meal. But the orcas blow bubbles, apparently to deter the pest.
Erick Higuera-Rivas, a marine biologist and documentarian who filmed the hunts from a boat nearby, said he didn’t promptly recognize the importance of the footage untill he went to edit it.
“I saw in the monitor that the shark had the liver hanging out on the side, already popped off. And a few minutes later, they came up with the liver in their mouth,” said Higuera Rivas, who coauthored the study. “I was surprised that it could be a great white. I was not believing it.”
Heather Bowlby, a research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada who was not involved in the research, said the footage offered a compelling reminder that even top predators must watch their backs.”We’re so conditioned to thinking of white sharks as the top of the food chain,” she said. “It is always amazing to be reminded they are prey.”
Higuera-Rivas and his fellow researchers said the hunts appear to be the work of the same group of orcas,which they’ve named the “Moctezuma pod.” The pod frequents the waters off of Baja california and only hunt elasmobranchs – sharks and whales. Higuera-Rivas has been following the pod for more than a decade and filming their behavior, and he’s observed how the whales adapt their behavior to whatever species the group is targeting.
The only prior evidence that orcas hunt great white sharks comes from South Africa, where they have been preying on the sharks for years and extracting their livers, leaving shark carcasses to wash up on the beach.
Alison Towner, a marine biologist at Rhodes University who has studied the phenomenon in South Africa, said the behavior in Mexico is