Shocked scientists witness male killer whale drowning an infant whale

Be it humans or animals, it is pretty horrifying to see someone kill a child. That’s what exactly happened when a male killer whale drowned a one-day-old infant killer whale just so that it could mate with the infant’s mother.

Terrified Jared Towers and two of his colleagues witnessed the horrendous accident when they were out to observe a group of orcas off the coast of Vancouver Island. For over an hour, the group photographed numerous whales that included an orca calf, which seemed to be a day or maybe a few hours old.

According to The Washington Post, the incident that took place back in 2016 and reported now in the journal Scientific Reports, consisted of something the trio would never forget. As soon as the researchers were about to head back off, some splashing noise and ‘erratic movements’ caught their attention and they thought that the whale group was attacking some prey.

Listen to killer whale speaking English

However, when they went a bit closer they noticed that the baby whale was missing and just few moments later, a 32-year-old male orca swam by with the baby in his mouth, “The baby was hanging out of his mouth. I knew right off the bat — I study killer whales pretty intensively — that this was a ‘first of its kind’ kind of observation,” said Towers, the cetacean researcher from Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Researchers continued observing as the male orca sustained dragging the same species of baby killer whale and drowning it while its 28-year-old mother tried its best to stop it. What’s more surprising is, an older female killer whale, the 46-year-old mother of the male orca helped her son drown the infant as she blocked the calf’s mother from reaching its newborn.

Video Credits: The Washington Post

As per The Guardian, researchers predict that because infanticide occurs among mammals due to mating purposes, they assumed that the male killer whale might have drowned the infant to mate with the mother, however, the mother fought back and hit the male. At one point, she rammed him so hard that his body undulated, ‘sending blood and water into the air,’ the report read.

After 10-12 minutes, the whales calmed down with the infant orca still in male whale's mouth. “I think it may be because the mother realized the calf was dead, so what was the point of continuing to fight after that?” Towers said.