What do orcas look like?

If you’re an eight-metre-long, six-tonne predator, sneaking up on a tasty herring can be a tricky business. Which is where an orca’s black-and-white colouring is useful. This patterning works like camouflage, from above and below. It breaks up their appearance and makes them harder to see in the water.

But above water, orcas’ tall dorsal fins make them easy to spot when they’re swimming close to the surface. Males have longer dorsal fins – up to two metres – that’s taller than most humans.

What’s life like for an orca?

Orcas live in family pods of up to 50 individuals. Calves do not leave their mothers’ sides when they become adults, and you’ll sometimes find pods containing four generations. The eldest female orca is in charge, telling the group when and where to feed.

To be a successful orca, you need to master a huge range of skills: hunting tactics, social interaction, knowledge of feeding and breeding grounds, and migration routes. Adult members of the pod teach the young these essential life skills, and one day they will pass on these skills to their own children. This knowledge forms a kind of orca ‘culture’, handed down from generation to generation.

What do orcas eat?

Orcas hunt in packs, co-ordinating their feeding raids with incredible skill. They eat a variety of different prey, including fish, seals, dolphins, sharks, rays, whales, octopuses and squids. But often a pod will specialise in eating just one type of animal. For instance, one pod might have perfected their seal-hunting skills over many generations and focus only on seals, while another pod might be awesome at chasing down salmon, and so they ignore everything else.