Killers will apparently eat anything that swims and fish, birds, seals, walrus, whales, and porpoises are all equally acceptable. Their capacity is almost unbelievable, and there is a record of thirteen porpoises and fourteen seals being taken from the stomach of a twenty-one-foot specimen.
Dr. Wilson speaks of killers in the Antarctic as follows:
Of the whales, the most prominent of all are the Killers, or Orca whales, which scour the seas and the pack-ice in hundreds to the terror of seals and penguins. The Killer is a powerful piebald whale of some fifteen feet in length. It hunts in packs of a dozen, or a score, or sometimes many scores. No sooner does the ice break up than the Killers appear in the newly formed leads of water, and the penguins show well that they appreciate the fact by their unwillingness to be driven off the floes.
From the middle of September to the end of March these whales were in McMurdo Strait, and the scars that they leave on the seals, more particularly on the Crab-eating seal of the pack-ice, afford abundant testimony to their vicious habits. Not one in five of the pack-ice seals is free from the marks of the Killer’s teeth, and even the Sea Leopard, which is the most powerful seal of the Antarctic, has been found with fearful lacerations.
Only the Weddell Seal is more or less secure, because it avoids the open sea. Living, as it does, quite close inshore, breeding in bights and bays on fast ice some ten or twenty miles from the open water, it thus avoids the attacks of the Killer to a large extent.[[12]]
[12]. “The Voyage of the Discovery,” 1905, App., p. 470.
In Japan killers are abundant, especially near Korea, and I have seen numbers of the animals in the Bering Sea and along the coast of Vancouver Island. The Japanese call the killer “takamatsu” and in various parts of America it is known as the orca, thresher, or grampus. The two latter terms are especially confusing and inappropriate, for the name thresher properly belongs to a shark and grampus to a species of porpoise (Grampus griseus).
The trident-shaped area of white, the white spots behind the eyes, and the enormous dorsal fin are very conspicuous on the black body, and the animal may be recognized at a long distance; fœtal specimens have orange-buff where the adult is white.
The killer can swim at a tremendous speed and because of the nature of its food the sounds and bays along the coast which swarm with every variety of marine life are more frequently its feeding grounds than the open sea.
Scammon says that the killer is a menace to even the full-grown walrus, especially when pups are with their parents. He states that sometimes the young walrus will mount upon its mother’s back to avoid the killer and that then “the rapacious orca quickly dives, and, coming up under the parent animal, with a spiteful thud throws the young one from the dam’s back into the water, when in a twinkling it is seized, and, with one crush, devoured by its adversary.”[[13]]