There was an old orca who swallowed 7 sea ottters.
Scientists investigate mysterious case of orca that swallowed 7 sea otters whole
The female orca was found far from her normal hunting ground with six whole sea otters in its stomach and one lodged between its oral cavity and the esophagus.
A stranded female orca (
Orcinus orca) was found with six sea otters (
Enhydra lutris) inside her stomach. (Image credit: Photo credit: Sergey V. Fomin)
Scientists in Russia discovered seven perfectly intact sea otters in the belly of a beached orca, according to a new study. The doomed
killer whale was found far from its normal hunting grounds, raising the question of what it was doing there.
The female orca (
Orcinus orca) was found in 2020 on the coastline of one of the Commander Islands, which lie offshore the Russian Far East in the Bering Sea. Scientists performed a necropsy on the animal and discovered not only the seven dead sea otters (
Enhydra lutris), which collectively weighed 258 pounds (117 kilograms), but also 256 cephalopod beak parts.
One sea otter was lodged between the oral cavity and the esophagus, which may have led to the whale's demise, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Sept. 28 in the journal
Aquatic Mammals.
Several things about the killer whale have puzzled the researchers.
"It is very unusual because orcas don't normally eat sea otters," study co-author
Olga Filatova, a cetacean researcher at Moscow State University, told Live Science in an email.
Instead, they hunt seals, sea lions, dolphins and even other whales. And whatever prey species they hunt, "they normally don't swallow prey whole — they usually tear it apart and eat only the best (most fatty) parts," Filatova said.
Gulping down whole sea otters was likely challenging for the doomed orca, as adult sea otters can reach
up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) long. The researchers think the orca may have taken this extraordinary step because it was starving.