How hard do you have to ram a fish to make it explode? Ask an orca.
Barreling into large, heavy fish with enough force to blast them into instant chum is a previously unknown collaborative feeding strategy among orcas, scientifically called Orcinus orca, also known as killer whales.
But in 2024 and 2025, divers captured underwater video of two such events in the Mexican Pacific Ocean and in the Gulf of California. The footage suggests that the brutal body slamming may be in service of a meal — or perhaps a form of play for the orcas, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Ethology.
“I filmed the first event several years ago and couldn’t believe what I was witnessing,” said lead study author Kathryn Ayres, a research scientist for the marine conservation nonprofit Beneath the Waves and the first to capture orcas’ high-speed ramming on video.
Ayres studies sharks but observing orcas that preyed on sharks in the Gulf of California sparked her interest in killer whale behavior. She filmed the encounter on July 29, 2024, while diving as an ocean safari tour guide with the group Latitude Encounters, near the coast of San José del Cabo in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur.
