Chapter XVIII: The Wolf of the Sea

Although the killer whale has no great commercial value, it is often brought in at the shore stations and figures so prominently in all deep-sea life that to omit it from any book on whaling would be a grave error.

The killer is the wolf of the sea and like the land wolves hunts in packs of twenty or more individuals which will attack and devour almost anything that swims. Every whaleman has stories to tell of the strength and ferocity of these sea terrors, but I think that the incident witnessed by Captain Robert F. Scott and published in the journal of his last ill-fated expedition is one of the most remarkable experiences of which I have ever known. It is so interesting that I have quoted it in full:

Thursday, January.—All hands were up at 5 this morning and at work at
6. Words cannot express the splendid way in which everyone works and
gradually the work gets organized. I was a little late on the scene
this morning, and thereby witnessed a most extraordinary scene.

Some 6 or 7 killer whales, old and young, were skirting the fast floe
edge ahead of the ship; they seemed excited and dived rapidly, almost
touching the floe. As we watched, they suddenly appeared astern,
raising their snouts out of water. I had heard weird stories of these
beasts, but had never associated serious danger with them. Close to
the water’s edge lay the wire and stern rope of the ship, and our two
Esquimaux dogs were tethered to this.

“The killer is the wolf of the sea and like the land wolves hunts in
packs of twenty or more individuals which will attack and devour
almost anything that swims.” This specimen, taken at Oshima, Japan,
was twenty-six feet in length, and its skeleton was sent to the
American Museum of Natural History.
]

I did not think of connecting the movements of the whales with this
fact, and seeing them so close I shouted to Ponting, who was standing
abreast of the ship. He seized the camera and ran toward the floe edge
to get a close picture of the beasts, which had momentarily
disappeared. The next moment the whole floe under him and the dogs
heaved up and split into fragments. One could hear the “booming” noise
as the whales rose under the ice and struck it with their backs.

A posterior view of a killer showing the high dorsal fin. In the male
the dorsal is over six feet in height but in the female it is only
four feet.
]

Whale after whale rose under the ice, setting it rocking fiercely;
luckily Ponting kept his feet and was able to fly to security. By an
extraordinary chance also, the splits had been made around and between
the dogs, so that neither of them fell into the water. Then it was
clear that the whales shared our astonishment, for one after another
their huge hideous heads shot vertically into the air through the
cracks which they had made. As they reared them to a height of 6 or 8
feet it was possible to see their tawny head markings, their small
glistening eyes, and their terrible array of teeth—by far the largest
and most terrifying in the world. There cannot be a doubt that they
looked up to see what had happened to Ponting and the dogs.

The latter were horribly frightened and strained to their chains
whining; the head of one killer must certainly have been within 5 feet
of one of the dogs.

After this, whether they thought the game insignificant, or whether
they missed Ponting is uncertain, but the terrifying creatures passed
on to other hunting grounds, and we were able to rescue the dogs, and,
what was even more important, our petrol—5 or 6 tons of which was
waiting on a piece of ice which was not split away from the main mass.

Of course, we have known well that killer whales continually skirt the
edge of the floes and that they would undoubtedly snap up any one who
was unfortunate enough to fall into the water; but the facts that they
could display such deliberate cunning, that they were able to break
ice of such thickness (at least 2½ feet), and that they could act in
unison, were a revelation to us. It is clear that they are endowed
with singular intelligence, and in future we shall treat that
intelligence with every respect.[11]

Footnote 11:

“Scott’s Last Expedition.” Arranged by Leonard Huxley. New York, 1913,
Vol. I, pp. 65–66.

Dr. Charles H. Townsend, Director of the New York Aquarium, tells of an interesting experience on the Pribilof Islands, which illustrates the terror in which the killers are held by other water mammals. He was collecting a number of the great Steller’s sea lions for the Smithsonian Institution and was shooting the animals, which were on land, with a repeating rifle.

The sea lions began rushing toward the water in terror when suddenly the high dorsal fin of a killer whale appeared a few fathoms offshore. The sea lions stopped short and could not be forced into the water, preferring to face the unknown danger of the rifle rather than certain death in the jaws of an enemy which from earliest babyhood they had been taught to fear.

The killer belongs to the dolphin family, of which it is the largest member, reaching a length of from twenty to thirty feet. These animals are found in almost every ocean of the world and, although several species have been described, probably there is but one, _Orca orca_. The dorsal fin of the male is six feet high while that of the female is but three and one-half or four feet, and this has led to the naming of specimens which have proved to be only the male and female of the same species.

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]

Footnote 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]

Footnote 13:

(_l. c._, p. 92.)

The killer’s habit of forcing open a whale’s mouth and eating the tongue from the living animal, is an extraordinary method of attack which has long been recorded by the whalemen who hunted the Arctic bowhead. I must confess, however, that I had always been skeptical as to the accuracy of this report until my own experiences with the gray whales in Korea, where its truth was clearly demonstrated.

Another story which is undoubtedly purely mythical, although it has astonishingly wide credence, is that of “the swordfish and the thresher.” It is said that a swordfish with a killer will attack a large whale, prodding the animal from below with its “sword” and preventing it from diving, while the killer tears out the tongue.

An anterior view of a killer. The heavy teeth and the white spot just
behind the eye are well shown.
]

I have personally interviewed a number of men who were reported to have witnessed such a combat, but have never yet found one who had seen a swordfish, or had any evidence of one being there, although the killer could easily be seen. They usually defend their story by saying that a swordfish must have been below, otherwise the whale would have sounded. Undoubtedly what prevents the whale from diving is the fact that it becomes paralyzed with fright and so utterly confused that it is unable to escape.

An orca probably could not kill a large whale alone, but single individuals undoubtedly cause all the fin whales great annoyance by biting off the tips of their flukes and flippers; at least two-thirds of the whales brought to the stations had the flukes or flippers injured. I have a photograph of a young finback whale with the flipper torn and mangled and plainly showing a killer’s teeth marks.

The sperm whale is probably the only marine animal which is more than a match for a herd of killers. The enormous lower jaw of a sperm whale presents an array of teeth even more formidable than those of the orca, and I greatly doubt if the killer could succeed in terrifying this whale; it is significant that the flukes and flippers of sperms are practically always free from injuries.

Like other members of the dolphin family, the killer has twelve teeth in both jaws and they may be readily distinguished from those of the sperm whale by their smaller size and flatter basal portion.