What Orcas Are Changing in Antarctica Might Surprise You

0:00 Orcas are changing Antarctica faster than scientists expected. What if the most powerful predator in Antarctica is also the least understood? Orcas aren't just hunting. They're teaching. They're adapting. And they're reshaping entire ecosystems in real time, and scientists are just starting to catch up. This is the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, your weekday ocean news update. If you care about staying informed on the Ocean every weekday, hit that follow button right now so you don't miss tomorrow's story. Antarctic orcas are not just one population. They're multiple ecotypes. Type 1, B1, B2 and C each with different diets, behavior and hunting styles.

0:47 Recent research shows that these groups rarely mix. They specialize deeply, and some may even be on separate evolutionary paths. So this is not just biodiversity. This is multiple predators occupying the same Ocean in completely different ways. Like just imagine all these orcas in and around the same area, and they're not mixing. This is showing that there's probably different dialects, there's different behaviors, there's different eating patterns. It just goes to show that these orcas are highly intelligent, emotionally intelligent, and very, very specialized in their ways, just like humans in some way.

1:29 And you wonder if they have beef with other different ecotypes. One of the most studied orca behaviors that we have seen is how they create waves to wash seals off ice. So if you've seen any of these videos around, it's really cool. You'll see usually two orcas on one side of an ice float where there's a seal on that ice float. And on the other side there is one orca just waiting, waiting for this seal to fall off. And you're trying to wonder like what do these orcas do to get this seal to fall off. The orcas behind two, maybe three, they will drive. They will swim as fast as they can towards the ice float and cause a tidal wave. They dive underneath the ice float. The wave hits the seal and the seal gets moved closer to that one orca that's waiting on the other side.

2:12 If that doesn't hit him off that first wave, they'll do it again and again and again until that tidal wave knocks the seal off. The orca either falls right into his mouth or the orca goes and chases it in the water and gets his meal. This is coordinated behavior, coordinated hunting, and it's really interesting because it's one of those behaviors where we're seeing Marine mammals actually hunt for another individual in their pod. It's really interesting to see if you ever have a chance. I know it's sad to see this poor seal die, but the way these coordinated efforts work, these coordinated hunts work is just unbelievable. It's really cool to see. Recent drone research revealed that these groups are coordinated. They have different roles that they do.

2:53 There's precise timing in this hunting behavior, and there's learned behavior that passes across generations. This is culture, not instinct. That's what's really interesting in how this is done. We talk about culture in animals as a bit of a conservation factor because being able to study these animals, especially orcas that have this type of culture, that have different dialects and behaviors with the different pods that they're in, or even different ecotype especially in the northeast Pacific, the Northwest of US and Southwest of Canada, you'll see like resident orca populations past transient orca populations, and they don't even mix. They don't even have the same dialect apparently. And so that's kind of a cool thing that we need to study these different patterns, these different dialects, these different behaviors to see why they're so different and understand this animal a lot more.

3:44 'Cause losing one of these pods could mean we lose a lot of information about these orcas. And that's something that I don't want to see done in ever. And so that's something that is very worrisome for me as a biologist, as a scientist, as an Ocean conservationist. And of course, as the Antarctic ice declines, orcas are gaining access to new hunting areas that they've never had access to before. Seal and penguin populations are shifting because of that, and predator prey relationships are also changing. Some studies suggest orcas may be increasing pressure on certain species as the ice retreats. Think about that. Not only is your home retreating for penguins and seals and so forth where they need ice to relax, but you have these orcas, these highly, highly intelligent animals that hunt together.

4:35 They get smarter and smarter every time in their hunting. They refine their hunting skills and their hunting patterns, and they are now putting more pressure on penguins and on seals in the Antarctic because they are hunting better and the ice is retreating due to climate change. That is kind of scary, to be honest if I were one of those animals, those prey animals. It's something that once they have access to new areas, they change everything. Very similar to the wolves that were reintroduced in Yellowstone. They're everywhere now. They've repopulated places. They've actually expanded more than ever and they're now doing really well, which is great to see. But they've actually changed that entire park, the way from what it was. And so that's really interesting. So you can almost ask the question for the orcas, like, are the orcas stabilizing or destabilizing ecosystems in climate change?

5:19 Are they that much of an added pressure? You talk about Antarctica, but we also talk about South Africa. You have these two orcas that are inhibiting the population of great whites by adding another cumulative effect onto climate change, onto overfishing, onto a lot of different things. That's a big problem for those great whites in South Africa. They're disappearing. They're declining, and they're moving around to find more food. And now they have to worry about these pressure for these orcas. So orcas are really, like I said, they're very efficient hunters and they are something to be worrisome about. That's something that's really interesting. Oracles are not just predators. They're also ecosystem engineers, if you will. So just hold on for like stay with me for a bit.

5:59 When they change behavior, prey population shift, just like penguins and seals in Antarctica. Food webs get reorganized and entire systems end up responding. This is happening right now in Antarctica. When you have animals being pressured because their habitat is decreasing, you're gonna start to see things being removed. Like I said, great white sharks in South Africa are being removed. That's changing the ecosystem. That's changing the food web dynamics of that entire system. You're seeing other sharks increase in population ' cause there's less pressure on there and there's overfishing involved so that can cause a lot of problem. There's a lot of predator drama that happens when you start to see these different animals put pressure where other things are causing so much more pressure.

6:44 So climate change is causing a lot of pressure. And then you have this predator that moves in and kind of eviscerates a population or changes that population. We still don't know their population sizes. We still don't know how climate change will affect each ecotype. Whether human activity will disrupt their culture, we don't know. And to be honest, that's the risk. You can't protect what you fully don't understand. And I think that's a, a big, big problem. There's so many gaps. Antarctica used to be such a big area to worry about because we can't get there all the time. It's very difficult to work in there. And by the end of the week, you're gonna hear an interview I did with Ocean Networks Canada on their work installing essentially a system, a data acquisition system, or two in Antarctica because something had already gone wrong before they teamed up with some Spanish researchers on their Spanish base, and they implemented these things to look at ice flows.

7:38 Really interesting research. Now, a little bit more accessible because Antarctica is melting. Not a good thing that it's accessible but we're starting to learn more about this melting and more about how this can really change. The logistics of work in Antarctica is very, very difficult, very challenging. Now we're just starting to learn the ramifications of climate change, especially in these areas. So you wonder like, are we reacting too late to Antarctic research? Is this something that we should have done maybe a little bit earlier? But we are doing it now. And that's the really the thing. And orcas and Antarctica are not just surviving change. They're actually driving change. And if we don't understand them, and we don't understand the future of the Southern Ocean.

8:22 And I think that is a big thing when we look at science, when we look at biology, when we look at Antarctica and how these penguins and seals and other animals that are in Antarctica, how important they are to our system and how important, just the habitat, just Antarctica in general, that's this big ice island, that continent really, that is driving so much change in the world and we don't really understand it and we need to understand it a lot better. So, that's it for today's episode. I really appreciate it. If you wanna learn more about Antarctica this week, you will learn a lot because we're gonna be talking about different animals that are around. We're gonna be talking about leopard seals and penguins, and we're also gonna be talking about glaciers and we're gonna be talking about what it's like to work there in an interview on Friday.

9:05 So we have all week of just Antarctica News and I can't wait to bring it to you. So follow How to protect the Ocean for your daily Ocean Science updates. It's gonna be a lot of fun. I can't wait to see you tomorrow. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.