On game night, it’s easy to pick a side to cheer for. When the stakes are life or death – and both sides are icons of Greater Victoria’s waters – choosing who to champion is not so easy.
That was the decision facing Sooke resident Kevin Morgan when he got a front row seat to a spectacular display of the beauty and brutality of the natural world.
After finishing work Aug. 31 near the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Patricia Bay, Morgan and his colleagues watched as a pod of orcas hunted a buffet of harbour seals hauled out on a floating log breakwater.
Morgan says there were up to eight orcas working together as a team to spook the seals into the water.
“On lots of occasions, it looked like they were bumping into the logs and/or creating waves,” he said. “Anything just to disrupt the logs to get the seals off and into the water, where they could have better access to them.”
Morgan estimates up to eight seals fell victim to the killer whales’ tactics, with one of the kills captured on video. After what appears to be a quick chase through the water, one whale appears at the surface, holding a seal in its mouth.
The spectacle left him with mixed emotions, ranging from sadness to excitement as he watched the hunt unfold.
“You see the seals jump in, and you’re saying, ‘No, no,’” he says. “But at the same time, you’re kind of wanting the orcas to get them – they have to eat just as much as the seals, and if that’s their food source, then we want to make sure that the orcas are surviving as well.”
Living on Vancouver Island, Morgan has seen orcas up close before, but never a display quite like this.
“Overall, it’s just incredible to see – pretty surreal, but hard to look away,” he says.
Erin Gless, executive director for the Pacific Whale Watch Association, said hunts like the one Morgan caught on camera are happening all the time along B.C.’s coast.
“There’s just very rarely a person there at the ready with a camera to capture it,” she said. “Right place, right time for sure – I’m very jealous, that’s a really cool encounter.”
Watching the video, Gless says after catching the seal, the whale swims off to share its prey with its pod.
“She’s gonna share it with her entire family,” she said. “It’s kind of gruesome, but they’ll all rip it apart and take pieces, and so they eat together.”
The predatory behaviour observed in the video is typical of Bigg’s killer whales, says Gless, who notes they will often create waves to knock their prey off docks, rocks and floating ice floes in Antarctica.
Like Morgan, Gless finds it difficult to watch the seals fall prey to the whales.
“I think it’s just the natural instinct of the seals to kind of startle, but unfortunately, they startle into the water, which is the worst place to be,” she said. “The smart ones are the ones that are staying on the logs.
“Orcas definitely need to eat, but it’s hard for me to see sometimes. I’m kind of a bleeding heart gal myself.”
The pod of Bigg’s killer whales showing off their hunting prowess is the T109As, relatives of Brave Little Hunter, the orphan orca calf who caught the world’s attention in 2024, when, after a month stranded inside a Vancouver Island tidal lagoon, she made a bid for freedom.
Since her escape, there have been no confirmed sightings of the calf for around two years, with many experts assuming she has not survived.
“But you know, we’ve been surprised before,” said Gless. “We’ve had whales show up five years later that we had assumed could have passed away, and they were just off, you know, doing their own thing. So you never know.”
While hope remains for Brave Little Hunter, Gless says this summer has brought its fair share of orca sightings close to shore around Vancouver Island and Washington state.
Just days after Morgan’s encounter, a pod visited Victoria’s Inner Harbour not once, but twice in one day.
Gless suspects the increase in sightings could be linked to “harbour seal pup season.”
“So maybe they’re checking all of these little marinas and inlets to try to take advantage of some easy meals, but yeah, if you’re a shore-based person, keep your eyes out because these whales are popping up in unexpected places.”