Hakai is the go-to magazine for marine stories, and we hope to see more work of Craig Welch, the science journalist who wrote the article below, in the future: Meet the Killer Whales You Thought You Knew The iconic marine mammals may not belong t…
Although all the planet's killer whales are currently considered a single species (Orcinus orca), some of the world's leading experts are proposing to split them into three species. Photo by imagebroker.com/Alamy Stock Photo
Hakai is the go-to magazine for marine stories, and we hope to see more work of Craig Welch, the science journalist who wrote the article below, in the future:
The iconic marine mammals may not belong to one species but several. Surprise!
Transient, or Bigg's, killer whales, not only look, sound, and act differently than their resident killer whale neighbors, they might be an entirely different species. Danita Delimont Creative/Alamy Stock Photo
John Ford still recalls the first time he heard them. He'd been puttering around the Deserters Group archipelago, a smattering of spruce- and cedar-choked islands in Queen Charlotte Strait, between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia. He was piloting a small skiff and trailing a squad of six killer whales. Ford, then a graduate student, had been enamored with cetacean sounds since listening to belugas chirp while he worked part-time at the Vancouver Aquarium as a teenager. Now here he was, on August 12, 1980, tracking the underwater conversations of wild killer whales through a borrowed hydrophone.
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