An Orca called Gudrun lived in Dolfinarium Harderwijk (NL) between 1976-87, gave a show together with Bottlenose Dolphins. AFAIK Miami Seaquarium keeps an Orca with a group of Pacific white-sided Dolphins ... but maybe there are more examples ...
An Orca called Gudrun lived in Dolfinarium Harderwijk (NL) between 1976-87, gave a show together with Bottlenose Dolphins. AFAIK Miami Seaquarium keeps an Orca with a group of Pacific white-sided Dolphins ... but maybe there are more examples ...
'Cuddles' was kept with bottlenose dolphins at Flamingo Park. 'Keiko' when he was in Mexico. Vancouver kept white-side with their orca. It seems to have been common in the past but mainly with young animals.
Winnie and Nemo wouldn't have eaten the sea lions in the first place, even if they'd stayed wild. They were Resident pods (Resident meaning a pod of Orca that stay in a small area only eating fish). Not the mammal eating residents (unlike say Kshamenk or even Nami). Ku was kept at Port Of Nagoya successfully with Bottlenosed Dolphins, to the point that she even moved like one. There are some wonderful pictures of her jumping with dolphins and she jumped different to other Orca's. Keiko also took on a lot of the Bottlenosed Dolphins vocalizations and made them instead of normal orca vocalizations.
Lolita of Miami SeaQuarium fame has lived with BND's, Pacific-White sides and a pilot whale on occassion.
'Cuddles' was kept with bottlenose dolphins at Flamingo Park. 'Keiko' when he was in Mexico. Vancouver kept white-side with their orca. It seems to have been common in the past but mainly with young animals.
A very good point. Both ‘Winnie’ and ‘Nemo’ where killer whales from Iceland caught 1977 and 1981 respectively.
You are correct that these animals come from populations that are fish eaters; there main wild diet being herring or mackerel. This isn’t to say that killer whales in the Atlantic do not eat other marine mammals and research by Andrew Foote and his team at University of Aberdeen have found a correlation between the common seals pupping season in Scotland and peak killer whale sightings which suggest predation.
There is currently on-going debate as to why the common seal population is in decline in Scottish waters and some suggest this may be predation by killer whales. However, the grey seal populations in the same area appear not to be in decline in fact they are rising so it could be inter-species competition for fish.
It should be noted that the Pacific north-west population (which have been demographically easier to study than the Atlantic populations) do indeed fall into groups labelled ‘transient’ and ‘resident’ which seem to be prey specific; some eat fish, some eat marine mammals. Although I am not aware of these labels being used for the Atlantic populations.
One very interesting trait of marine mammal eating killer whales is they stalk their prey in silence so as not alter their prey whereas fish eating killer whale activity use their sonar. Incidentally there have been comments in the media in the past that killer whales can stun their fish prey with their sonar – this doesn’t appear to be true.
