272 WHALES 



feed on fairly small fish, and Common Porpoises, for instance, restrict their 

 diet mainly to herring, whiting and sole. (There is the reported case of a 

 Bottlenose Dolphin which choked to death because it swallowed a shark 

 nearly four feet long). Stomachs of porpoises and Bottlenoses were found 

 to contain remnants of shrimps and cuttlefish as well. In some areas, cuttle- 

 fish even make up the major proportion of a Bottlenose's diet. When eat- 

 ing sepias, they spit out the calcium 'shell' and retain the edible portion. 

 Sea-weed, too, has been found in the stomachs of Bottlenose Dolphins, 

 while the stomach of a river dolphin Sotalia teuszii (Cameroons) was found 

 to be completely filled with leaves, fruit and grass. 



One of the most notorious marine predators is the Killer Whale or 

 Orca, an animal which may grow to a length of thirty feet. Its back is 

 black with characteristic white or yellow areas behind the eye and the 

 dorsal fin, which, in bulls, is particularly large and pointed. The fin cuts 

 through the water like a knife, but the claim that the Killer slits its 

 victims' bellies open must be dismissed as fable. Killers have, at one time 

 or another, infested every single sea on earth, and most sailors abhor them 

 just as much as they detest sharks. For Killers, too, feed on mammals, and 

 though I myself know of no single instance of a man having been devoured 

 by them, they are known to be notorious slayers of porpoises, dolphins, 

 seals, sea-lions, sea-otters. Narwhals and Belugas. They also eat penguins, 

 and attack young walruses, but keep well out of the way of older specimens 

 - indeed, they prefer the young of all their prey. 



The best illustration of the greed of a Killer Whale was provided by 

 the stomach of a specimen caught off one of the Pribylov Islands (Bering 

 Sea), which was found to contain thirty- two full-grown seals. The twenty- 

 foot Killer, weighing eight tons, which was washed ashore at Terschelling 

 (Holland) on 20th July, 1931, was obviously a little less well-fed, for its 

 stomach contained a mere three pregnant porpoises, each with a full-term 

 foetus. Killers also cause a veritable carnage among the relatively slow 

 Arctic Belugas, though, according to Freuchen, a man who studied these 

 animals for twenty years. Killers never devour female Belugas, which they 

 kill and then abandon. The cause of this odd behaviour has never been 

 explained. 



Killers do not restrict their attacks to smaller Cetaceans, but attack 

 even the biggest of Blue Whales. While they usually concentrate on 

 young victims, from three to forty of them will band together to fall upon 

 adults also. They dig their teeth deep into the lips, the pectoral fins and 

 particularly into the bottom of the mouth and the tongue of these colossal 

 though lumbering animals tearing out large hunks of flesh and leaving 

 the victim to die of loss of blood before devouring him. The slow Cali- 

 fornian Grey Whale is another of their favourite targets, and Andrews 



