Depredation by killer whales (Orcinus orca) on a blue shark (Prionace glauca) in Northeastern Atlantic

• Published in: Aquatic Mammals
• Main Authors: Mucientes, Gonzalo, González-Pestana, Adriana
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: European Association for Aquatic Mammals 2020
• Subjects: Pacific; Southern Ocean; Killer Whale; Orca; Orcinus orca; Killer whale
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/227371; https://doi.org/10.1578/AM.46.5.2020.478

5 pages, 1 table Killer whales (Orcinus orca) consume a wide variety of prey, including marine mammals, tele-ost fish, seabirds, sea turtles, and cephalopods (Ford, 2019). Killer whale populations throughout the world tend to exhibit dietary specialization, feeding selectively upon only a very small subset of prey species from the 200 species that they are known to predate (Heimlich-Boran, 1988; Baird etal., 1992; Ford, 2019). These ecological spe-cializations are maintained by their feeding habits and social behavior (e.g., acoustic repertoires), which result in reproductive isolation and, ulti-mately, genetic divergence (Ford & Ellis, 2014). Such ecologically specialized and reproductively isolated populations of killer whales are known as ecotypes. Around the world, 11 ecotypes have been identified: three in the northeastern Pacific, five in the Southern Ocean, and three in the north-eastern Atlantic (de Bruyn etal., 2013; Ford, 2019). These ecotype specializations reflect cul-tural traditions that have evolved over millennia in which feeding behaviors are passed from one gen-eration to the next by social learning (Ford, 2019) GM was supported by PTDC/MAR-BIO/4458/2012, IF/01611/2013, and NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000031 grants Peer reviewed