Orcas hunting other dolphins and porpoises must do everything possible to catch their fast and smart meal. After a exhaustive hunt they ram the prey with tremendous power and speed. The dazed victim is killed and divided among the other orcas. Needless to say that this is an impressive spectacle. The video below shows what happened above water. But how does it actually look underwater?

Josh McInnes is a young ecologist from Victoria, with a passion for the Transient (or Bigg’s) ecotype. He asked us to make a picture of his favorite orca, CA60, hunting a porpoise. And preferably underwater. Photos are not there so we used Photoshop. Coral Levy gave us a picture of an orca underwater and Leonard took pictures of harbor porpoises in Ecomare. He composed them together into a spectacular image.

Digital composite: Leonard Boekee (original orca picture: Coral Levy / © 2012)
 

On the realistic digital composite CA60 is just behind the harbor porpoise. The huge male orca will ram his prey a second later with a speed of about 50 kilometers per hour. With the help of digital technology we finally succeeded to capture this ‘impossible’ moment in a picture. Josh is very pleased with it and later, readers of Orcazine can also enjoy this image together with an interesting article about Bigg’s orcas.

Read more about Josh McInnes and his Transient killer whale research project.

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