Yet orcas that Holt and her co-investigators tagged over four years were consummate salmon slayers, especially the males, according to a 2019 paper .

“You can hear the fish respond by diving deeper; they escape to the bottom — and the whale follows them,” Holt said. “It’s a prolonged chase. It’s a lot of effort for the whales.”

To stay healthy, an adult killer whale must catch about 18-25 salmon every day. Chinook don’t school and must be chased down, whale by whale, and fish by fish. Salmon probably know when they have been targeted; pressure of the sound waves from an orca’s echolocation clicks may be felt by the fish tactically, along its lateral line, a nerve that sensitizes its sides.

Toothed whales, including orcas, and most bats have the ability to locate and identify objects through echoes, which are reflected sound. For killer whales, echolocation is crucial for hunting salmon.

Soon enough, the fish hangs out of both sides of the older whale’s mouth, big as a log. She shakes her head hard, and shags off a piece, for her younger family member who zooms into the older whale’s slipstream. It was gone in one chomp.

Rare footage from a research drone shows us a glimpse of a J pod family relying on each other to find and share food — an integral part of orca culture — and how hard it is to catch even one fish.

The southern residents don’t always dive to the depths for a meal; some hunts end right on the surface.

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Their teeth reveal their obsessions. Shark-killers’ teeth become sanded down from taking on rough-skinned prey. Chinook shredders like the southern residents have needle-sharp teeth and tear big fish in half with a shake of their heads.

With the orcas’ cunning intelligence, swaggering power and martial-arts moves, no animal on their menu is safe. Worldwide, orcas target about 140 species. Stingrays. Sharks. Sea lions. Minke whales. Octopus. And much, much more.

In every ocean of the world, orcas have evolved to target specific prey they have learned to hunt, using local environmental features and seasonal patterns in the waters they dominate. Ruthless, precision carnivores, orca live up to their species name, Orcinus orca: from the realm of the dead. They get their kill wherever it is, whatever it takes.

The Tyrannosaurus rex of the sea, orcas worldwide are devastating predators, ready to rip with a mouthful of conical interlocking teeth, up to 4 inches long.

But it’s not only the southern residents who are masters of the kill.

Orcas have carried on in their way of hunting and food sharing in these waters for generation after generation.

Orcas have been on our planet getting good at what they do far longer than humans. For more than 6 million years, orcas — actually not whales at all, but the ocean’s biggest dolphins — have evolved into a single species of many types.

In the Antarctic, orca slash through the water, fast and powerful as packs of wolves. They work together to make waves that wash seals right off the ice, straight into their jaws.

They thrash their tails to karate-chop great white sharks in Australia, and rip their livers out. They chase down, ram and drown baby gray whales off the coast of California, and tear off their lips and tongues. They storm the beaches of Argentina, and snatch baby seals right off the sand. They body slam and hurl white-sided dolphins through the air in B.C., and herd herring in Norway into terrorized silvery torrents, the better to stun and gulp them by the thousands.

Killer whales make three different types of sounds: whistles, calls and clicks. Whistles and calls are used for communication, while echolocation clicks help with navigation.

Echolocation click Frequency: 10,000 - 100,000 Hz

Duration: 0.1 to 25 miliseconds Play audio Pulse call Frequency: 500 - 30,000 Hz

Duration: 600 to 2,000 miliseconds Play audio Whistle Frequency: 2,000 - 50,000 Hz

Duration: 60 to 18,000 miliseconds Play audio

Each type has developed a learned culture, passed on family to family. That is why endangered southern resident killer whales won’t eat seals or porpoise, though they can easily kill them, and are even seen packing them around, tucked under a pectoral fin, seemingly just for fun. The southern residents will swim through an abundance of pink or sockeye salmon, saving their appetites for the prey they learned to hunt: big, fatty chinook, the most caloric prize for the hunting effort, and plentiful over the thousands of years during which this population of orcas evolved, since the ice-age glaciers melted in the northeastern Pacific. But today, even for the ocean’s top predator, the primal task of hunting salmon is getting harder. Given enough time, perhaps the southern residents could evolve to eat other prey. But their world is being changed by humans faster than an animal with a life span similar to our own can adapt.

Clash of maritime cultures With a rhythmic thudding sound, the container ship powers into the north end of Haro Strait and down the west side of San Juan Island. Scientist Rob Williams of the nonprofit Oceans Initiative has a hydrophone underwater, playing the ship’s noise over a speaker aboard the research boat Molly B. The boat’s pilot, Joe Gaydos, science director of the nonprofit SeaDoc Society, hears the ship from 10 miles away, long before he sees it. “It looks like a small city,” he says as the ship, the Xin Los Angeles — flagged in Hong Kong and the longest container ship in the world when built in 2006 — barrels along at 22 knots. With a capacity for 9,600 containers stacked seven rows high, it is nearly twice as long as the Space Needle is tall. The ship obliterates the view of Lime Kiln Lighthouse and leaves a seething wake.

It’s an ordinary moment in the Haro Strait, this long stretch of water that connects the U.S. and Canada and serves as a main drag for shipping traffic to and from Vancouver. But it’s also an extraordinary disturbance for animals sharing the waters and soundscape. Loafing harbor porpoise chuffing at the surface scram. As the Northwest grows, and its economy booms at the closest ports to the Pacific Rim, not a day — and scarcely an hour — passes without heavy industrial shipping traffic, recreational boaters, fishing vessels and ferries transiting critical habitat of the southern residents, including their prime foraging grounds in the summer. On this recent weekday, six ships in five hours traveled the Haro Strait flagged in four nations. There were the container ship Xin Los Angeles; one vehicle carrier; two cargo carriers; one bulk carrier; and one Canadian military training vessel, the steel-hulled Renard — dubbed Orca Class — with a rooster tail of water shooting behind it. A blazing fast crab boat was so far away it took binoculars to see, but could be heard for miles. The Northwest is a major maritime hub. The ports of Seattle and Tacoma together are the fourth largest container gateway in North America, with $73 billion in international trade, according to the Northwest Seaport Alliance. In Washington state alone, the maritime sector employs nearly 70,000 workers and generates more than $21 billion in revenue, according to the state Department of Commerce. The Port of Vancouver sustains trade with more than 170 economies around the world and supports more than 96,000 jobs in B.C. alone. In 2018, 147 million tons of cargo moved through the port, valued at $200 billion. The Port of Vancouver saw record-breaking traffic in 2017, and again in 2018. Current demand forecasts in a study for the Port of Vancouver anticipate container trade to double in the next 10-15 years and nearly triple by 2030.

LEARN MORE Explore a glossary of orca terms and our orca reading list. Waters already loud could get even noisier. The port wants to build another major container terminal at the Fraser River delta — right where orcas hunt. That proposal is under environmental review by the government of Canada, which also is poised to increase oil tanker traffic sevenfold in the Burrard Inlet to serve an expansion of the TransMountain Pipeline, boosting oil tanker traffic from about 60 to more than 400 oil tanker trips per year. All of those oil tankers would get to Canada through the southern residents’ primary summer foraging grounds. A 2017 study commissioned by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority of vessel noise from May to September in the whales’ critical habitat, including the Haro Strait, found increasing noise has the potential to affect the southern residents by changing their behavior; displacing them from their range; masking their communication; decreasing their foraging efficiency and creating hearing damage and stress. Overall, southern residents potentially lose as much as 20 to 23% of each day, or up to 5½ hours of foraging time from May through September, because of vessel noise, with approximately two-thirds of those effects due to large commercial vessels, and one third due to whale watching boats, according to the study. In trials sponsored by the port in 2017 and 2018, some shippers voluntarily slowed their speed of travel in the Haro Strait to reduce how much noise they make. The effects of the slowdown have yet to be determined. Retired physicist Val Veirs, of San Juan Island, and his son, oceanographer Scott Veirs, found that large ships have the biggest influence on the orcas’ ability to hear, both because ship traffic occurs just about every hour of the day year-round, and because ship sound frequencies overlap with the orcas’.

Scott Veirs, of Seattle, maintains the OrcaSound network of hydrophones in the Salish Sea, including right off the beach at his parents’ house on the west side of San Juan Island. Sounds stream in: The breathing of harbor seals. Groans of fish. Even the sound of airplanes overhead, heard through the water. But mostly, the sound of ships. The whales notice. In 2009, Val and Scot Veirs and Holt with other co-authors documented that orcas raise their voices above vessel noise, the way humans would by the side of a highway.

In a paper published in 2016 Veirs and his co-authors found ships are raising noise levels at the frequencies that are right in the sweet spot of killer-whale hearing. “The most complicated thing they do is hearing the echo off the swim bladder on a chinook that is 50 to 100 meters away in dark, cloudy water, where they can’t see more than a whale’s body length,” said Scott Veirs. “They are masters of sounds, and the entire heads are miraculous mechanisms for both generating sound and receiving it. But they need to be able to receive a very faint sound, the echoes off a little organ full of air inside a salmon.”