It’s the time of year when gray whales migrate along our coastline…but Orcas - or Killer Whales - are rarely seen off our shores.
However, in recent weeks…they’ve been spotted off the Coast near Oxnard, and in the Santa Barbara Channel near the Channel islands.
"Between December 11th and January 9th, they were confirmed on 15 different occasions in 30 days, which is amazing. We've had three different populations of killer whales seen in the Ventura, Oxnard, Channel Islands area. We've never had this before," said Alisa Schulman-Janiger from the California Killer Whale Project – which monitor killer whale activity.
She says it’s unusual to see any kind of Killer Whale here, but these whales are even more rare. They are part of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Group of Orcas, a group usually found off the coast of Mexico and Central America.
"We usually see the Bigg's Killer Whale, also known as Transients. So if you were off of California and told me you saw Killer Whales or orcas, then 99.9999% of the time, it would be one of the 200 plus Bigg's killer whales," said Schulman-Janiger.
"There have been a couple of sightings in the last week of December in the Channel Islands. There was also a very rarely seen eco type called Offshore Killer Whales. They feed on sharks and on large fish - never been known to eat mammals, and they were also seen the last week of December, also in the Channel Islands area, but not right near the other ones and on different days," she said.
"And then we come to what's called Eastern Tropical Pacific Killer Whales. It means the whales are seen from San Diego, south all the way to the Equator and out into the ocean. They're not as well studied, there's not as many sightings of particular groups, so we don't know all that much about them," she said.
"December 11th, they were documented off California. So basically they went from Long Beach up to Ventura, down to San Diego, back up to Ventura, back down to San Diego. And each time they hit San Diego, we thought, 'bye bye, they're going to Mexico,' and they back up the coast!"
Orcas main prey is bottlenose and common dolphins and Schulman-Janiger says the animals have been observed passing on their knowledge of how and where to hunt their prey.
"Up and down and up and down every day looking and hunting dolphin, mostly common dolphins, which are extremely common. We have hundreds of thousands of them off California. There's no danger of them eating all the common dolphin," she said.
"But they've also killed a couple of coastal bottlenose dolphin. And there's probably less than 500 of those all the way up and down the coast," said Schulman-Janiger.
"This last trip, they also got a newborn gray whale calf," she said.
And – she says – despite their more aggressive reputation, they also have a playful side.
"They're very, very intelligent creatures and very charismatic, and they have a lot of repertoire of feeding behaviors but also play behaviors. Coming up to boats and close interactions is something I've seen fairly often with EPTs," she said.
"Play activities can be passed around and become a kind of tradition and a fun thing for them to do. For example, there was a pod of killer whales that eat salmon who were wearing a salmon hat! They'd eat a salmon, put it on their head and float around with the salmon on their head, and it became a thing to do! Multiple whales started doing this - it was the summer of 1988 and it was the fashionable thing to do," she said.
Schulman-Janiger says that observers are best advised to watch from a safe distance, as part of an organized group run by experts and says that if you get a photograph, the organization will identify the whales and tell you more about them.
