Ben Madilynn
“There is, just to put it mildly, a lot of disagreement about how many species and subspecies are in the group,” says Barbara Taylor, a marine mammal expert and Red List coordinator for the IUCN Cetacean Specialist Group. “There is, I think, a very good chance that there are multiple species that are under Orcinus orca.”
Orcas have been divided into a number of different “ecotypes,” a looser term defined by the idiosyncratic behaviors, diets, migration patterns, and even personalities that emerge in different orca populations.
“There are orcas that eat penguins; they are specialized to communicate between each other to hunt them and they are super-efficient,” says Raúl Octavio Martínez Rincón, a biologist and researcher at the Northwest Biological Research Center in Mexico. “That is part of the definition of ecotype. It can be physical, like size, or can mean behavior, like eating, communication, and so on.”
(These orcas control the waves to hunt. It’s spine-tingling to watch.)
Orca ecotypes often have overlapping ranges, making their distinct characteristics even more surprising. For example, the so-called resident killer whales typically seen in the Pacific Northwest are heavily dependent on salmon, while others, like Bigg’s killer whales (also known as transient killer whales) have more varied diets consisting of other marine mammals and squid.
