Watch a pod of orcas pretending to drown one of their own in macabre training session

Orca moms teach their young how to pretend-drown each other, first-of-its-kind footage shows. The brutal training session teaches orcas the skills needed to kill the largest animal that has ever lived.

Later in the clip, the pod applies this technique while hunting a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus). The orcas appear to catch the whale off guard, giving them an advantage in what would otherwise be an unequal fight with the enormous whale. They crowd around the whale's head and submerge its blowhole, but it's unclear from the footage whether they succeed in killing the giant mammal.

While researchers already knew that orcas can kill whales by drowning them, "this practice-hunting behaviour has never been filmed before," a spokeswoman for the BBC, which filmed the footage for its new nature series "Parenthood," told The Times.

The clip is narrated by British biologist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough. "These orca need to be on top of their game," Attenborough explains in the footage. "They hunt the largest animals that have ever lived: blue whales."

Filmmakers used specialized underwater stabilizing devices called gimbals and tow cameras to capture the scene off the coast of Bremer Bay in Western Australia. "This technology allowed the crew to travel at the same speed as the orca hunting pack and provided new insights into their behaviour," the BBC spokeswoman told The Times.

Orcas pretend to drown one of their own to practice their hunting skills. We see several orcas splashing in the ocean. — For the first time, orcas have been filmed pretending to drown one of their own. (Image credit: Parenthood/BBC (screenshot))

Bremer Bay is home to an orca population of about 200 individuals, which makes it the largest known congregation of orcas in the Southern Hemisphere, according to the tour operator Bremer Bay Killer Whales. Pods range in size from six to 20 orcas, and they typically eat giant squid (Architeuthis dux) and colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) rather than blue whales.

Orcas likely hunt blue whales not for food, but simply because they can and want to have fun, experts say. "They play with [whales] like cats play with their prey," Nancy Black, a marine biologist who runs the whale-watching business Monterey Bay Whale Watch, told National Geographic after drone footage of orcas attacking a blue whale emerged in 2017.

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Sascha is a U.K.-based staff writer at Live Science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and the health website Zoe. Besides writing, she enjoys playing tennis, bread-making and browsing second-hand shops for hidden gems.

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