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NOAA’s New Orca Images Are Both Stunningly Beautiful And Disturbing

By Dustin Wicksell
Published on: 03:20 PST, Oct 15, 2014

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recently employed a remote control aerial vehicle to shadow orcas, and the footage they’ve captured has managed reveal the whales in both their most beautiful and vulnerable moments.

NOAA’s hexacopter captured images so sharp that it is possible to discern that some of the orcas are pregnant, according to IFLScience, despite being kept at a distance in order to avoid disturbing the whales. While orcas are apex predators, the whales are easily disturbed by vehicles that approach them too closely, prompting NOAA to warn drone owners to keep a respectful distance from them.

While the images are beautiful, scientists are also able to glean data from them, to track and determine the health of individual orcas, as NOAA Fisheries notes. One of the main questions researchers aim to answer is whether the orca population has enough food to sustain itself. The photos are disturbing in this regard, revealing some Northern resident orcas are emaciated and lack body fat. Several of the whales are in very poor condition, and researchers fear that declines in the Chinook salmon population, a primary food source, may be having a drastic impact on the orcas.

While NOAA was tracking the whales, one of the orcas failed to surface, appearing to have died beneath the waves. Astonishingly, a whale dubbed A46, the brother of the orca that perished, was observed calling out extensively after the loss. John Durban, of NOAA, noted that it is unclear whether the orca was seeking his sibling or announcing his brother’s death to the rest of the pod.

Recently, researchers in Russia were able to capture footage of a different kind, revealing a startlingly rare white orca. As the Inquisitr noted at the time, the Far East Russia Orca Project was operating off the southeastern coast of Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula when the sighting occurred. Though they observed the white orca for only a few seconds, the team was able to determine that the whale was likely a juvenile. Sightings of white orcas are so rare, only one mature adult has ever been spotted in the wild.

Despite the disturbing nature of some of the data, the hexacopter was also able to capture some strikingly beautiful images. One of the photos revealed by NOAA depicts two orcas either nuzzling or playfully headbutting each other.

[Image: NOAA via NOAA Fisheries]

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