them are mild and gende compared with the killer 

 whales. 



These are, beyond question, the most cruel, voracious 

 and bloodthirsty of all swimming creatures ; and we shall 

 see that their chief victims are other species of whales. 

 Man has waged ceaseless war against whales for centuries 

 but anything that he has done in attacking and killing 

 them cannot compare with the savage assaults of the 

 killers, which had been going on for eons before man 

 appeared on the earth, and which continue incessantly 

 with undiminished fury. 



The killer whale is a large porpoise, of the family 

 Delphinidae^ and constituting the genus Orcinus — it is 

 sometimes called the orca or grampus. They reach a 

 length of about twenty-five feet and are therefore smaller 

 than many of the whales that they attack. The head is 

 rounded and the lower jaw a little shorter than the 

 upper. The dorsal fin is remarkably high in the adult 

 males, and resembles a huge broadsword, nearly vertical 

 and about six feet from base to tip — in the female it is 

 prominent but shorter. The colour is peculiar — black 

 above and on the fins and white below, but the white of 

 the belly extends forward to the end of the lower jaw, 

 and upward on each side where it forms a large, oblong, 

 white area. Above and somewhat behind each eye is 

 another conspicuous white spot, also oblong. In the 

 young the white areas are tinged with yellow. The upper 

 and lower jaws of the killers are armed with stout, 

 powerful, curved teeth — anything from forty to fifty-six 

 of them. 



Other cetaceans — members of the whale family — feed 

 chiefly on plankton and do not eat other whales. But the 

 killers, hunting in packs, feed upon warm-blooded 

 aquatic animals, and mainly on young seals, porpoises 

 and the larger whales — in short they are cannibals, eat- 

 ing their own kind. In one instance the stomach of a 

 killer was found to contain the bodies of thirteen smaller 



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