Jamie Peterson will never forget the sight he saw in late March while aboard the Gladiator 3 fishing on the Scotian Shelf.
A killer whale spent two days cavorting about the long liner while Peterson and other crewmembers, Kelly Chase and Ricky
Carrigan, hauled up halibut.
“He was playing around the boat. He’d come up and slap his tail in the water,” said Peterson.
“We never had the camera ready and we were steaming away and he was behind the boat and he came right straight out of the water, flipped on his side and landed back in the water. It was quite a show actually. He was showing off for us.”
The vessel, which was skippered by Corey Atkinson out of East Pubnico in southwestern N.S. was about 140 miles off the coast.
Peterson, who took pictures and a video of the orca, said it was eating halibut off their line. He estimated the size of the loner at between 25 to 30 feet long.
These predatory mammals eat fish, marine birds and a large array of marine mammals, from seals and sea lions to dolphins and whales.
Andrew Hebda, curator of zoology for the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History says
this is within the zone where orcas can occur (from Florida to edge of ice in the Arctic).
“We hear of the occasional sighting, but haven't heard of any in the last couple of years. There have been sporadic reports throughout the North Atlantic including Northern Europe,” he said.
The museum has a tooth from an orca stranded on Sable Island in 1972, and a report of another stranded in the Minas Basin in 1950.
Hebda says the orca may have been in the area for food, but that normally they are encountered in family groups called pods, typically seen in the Pacific Northwest.
Kent Smedbol, a research scientist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans also expressed surprise at the lone sighting and said that males are more likely to travel alone than females. The DFO has had sporadic sightings of killer whales from Scotia-Fundy waters.
“Most cetacean experts consider orcas to be only occasional visitors to the Maritimes; sightings are more frequent around Newfoundland and Labrador,” he said.
Tara Stevens is a Ph.D. student at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. For the past two years she has been working with the DFO studying killer whales, humpback whales, fin whales, and other species. She helped to form the Northwest Atlantic Killer Whale Photo-Identification Catalogue and various other works.
“Killer whales do occur throughout the western North Atlantic, including the Scotian Shelf. They are, however, relatively rare on the Scotian Shelf (SS), at least when compared to sightings elsewhere in the northwest Atlantic, such as the Newfoundland/Labrador region.
“They might be seen on the SS a couple times every few years, and that is based primarily on opportunistic, non-effort based data,” she said.
“As for the habits of this species in these waters, we are not quite sure. By that, I mean that we do not know if the sightings of killer whales on the SS are simply of animals passing by, such as from Newfoundland/Labrador/Arctic Canada to/from southern regions, or if there is a permanent population within a range defined as the Scotian Shelf, or if they are part of a larger population that extends to
Arctic Canada,” said Stevens.
Scientists, tour operators and Inuit fishermen who crossed Hudson Bay notified Canadian researchers in 2006 about killer whales observations.
Researchers could not determine where the killer whales seen in Hudson Bay were coming from, but they suspect their origin is in the northern Atlantic Ocean, near Iceland or Nova Scotia.
FYI....
Date Latitude Longitude Number of whales sighted
14-Sept-67 44'01.2" 62'36" 1
15-Oct-92 42'02" 62'47" 1
03-Nov-92 42'03" 61'47" 3
23-Aug-99 44'20.73" 66'26.4 9
01-OCT-01 41'45" 63'42" 10
26-APR-03 43'37.38" 57'46.7 3
Source:NovaNewsNow.com
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