God, it's brutal out here

Drone footage shows orcas hunting and killing a great white shark. An asteroid moonlet spews debris thousands of miles after NASA crashed a spacecraft into it.

Oct 7, 2022

There are scarier things in the ocean than the great white shark. Take, for instance, a group of orcas on an organized killing spree.

A paper and accompanying footage published earlier this week in the journal Ecology have provided our first real evidence of orcas hunting down great whites — spurring surviving sharks to flee the area entirely, not returning for weeks after the massacre. While just one confirmed shark killing was caught on video by a drone, researchers suspect the orca pod took down a total of four sharks during the hour-long hunt in the Mossel Bay region of South Africa. They don’t call ‘em killer whales for nothing.

CW: This footage might be disturbing to some. Watch the video here.

It’s been believed for some time that killer whales hunt great white sharks, but the behavior had never been observed directly. According to the team, though, it’s likely becoming more common. The orcas seemed particularly interested in eating the sharks’ livers, the researchers note. (Sorry, too gruesome? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

Among the killer whales spotted in this encounter is a notorious predator known as Starboard. Personally, I think he’s earned a better nickname. "I first saw Starboard in 2015 when he and his close-associated 'Port' were linked to killing seven gill sharks in False Bay,” said David Hurwitz, a local whale-watching operator, in a press release. “We saw them kill a bronze whaler [copper shark] in 2019 — but this new observation is really something else.”

As mentioned earlier, the hunt sent great whites fleeing from waters they’d previously been seen in daily. In the subsequent weeks, only one was seen to return.

Remember two weeks ago, or so, when NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid on purpose?

If not, allow me to catch you up. The space agency has been developing a planetary defense strategy that involves deploying a specially designed spacecraft to headbutt objects that are on a collision course with Earth out of said path. It’s still in the demonstration phase and is known as DART — the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. In its first mission on Sept. 26, NASA slammed the DART craft into an asteroid moonlet dubbed Dimorphos. Dimorphos is the smaller of two objects in the binary asteroid system, Didymos. Mind you, this is a test, and neither of these objects actually poses a threat to our planet.

Anyway, the test went off without a hitch. You can see DART’s approach to the 160-meter-wide (525 feet) object from the spacecraft’s point of view in this little movie NASA made using the images it transmitted home.

In new images from observations after the planned collision, you can see the resulting debris trail that now stretches thousands of miles behind the moonlet. This trail was spotted two days after the test by a team operating the SOAR Telescope in Chile. It’s estimated it was 10,000 kilometers (6000 miles) long at the time of observation.

Suddenly, I’m feeling very small…