Killer whales got their name from 18th-century sailors who saw the black-and-white apex predators hunt down and kill whales of other species. The seafarers called them “whale killers,” a term that somehow got switched around in the linguistic journey back to dry land. But even for orcas, some whales are just too big to chow on.

This law of nature played out in living color recently during a whale-watching trip in California’s Monterey Bay. In a video posted to YouTube Tuesday, a small pod of “transient” killer whales encounters a massive blue whale, the largest animal on Earth. At the end of the 60-second clip, the blue whale lumbers to the surface, only to be harassed and attacked by an orca that appears to attempt to bite its giant fluke. Fear not: The massive creature escapes the ordeal.

Transient killer whales, in contrast to their fish-eating “resident” orca cousins of the Pacific Northwest, have been observed hunting a variety of marine mammals, including seals, sea lions, dolphins, pilot whales, and even larger species of whales, such as California gray whales (especially the young and the sick). Some transients have been seen killing great white sharks, and they have even attacked deer and elk swimming between small islands in British Columbia.

Blue whales are typically not on the menu. The average blue whale is 83 feet long, three to four times longer than a typical killer whale. Blues weigh in at about 220,000 pounds, more than 12 times the size of the largest orcas (at 18,000 pounds, still not to be messed with).

Typically, killer whales pick on prey smaller than them: They have been seen flinging seals high up into the air over and over, in an effort, it is believed, to wear out the pinniped.

People don’t always like it when killer whales live up to their fearsome name, and as evidenced by comments on the clip’s YouTube page, some were angry that whale watchers in the video seem to be cheering at the underwater scuffle.

“How can so called civilized human beings cheer at creatures attacking each other?” one commenter wondered. The answer, of course, is that even at its cruelest, nature is a spectacular sight to behold. Many people shun the term “killer whale” and prefer to call the animals “orcas,” out of some misguided effort to preserve the animals’ reputation.

That’s silly: Killer whales kill.

We will never know why this orca decided to take on a blue whale. The motive might have been harassment, or even a form of roughhousing. Whatever the reason, it was definitely biting off more than it could chew.