WHALE HUNTING WITH GUN AND CAMERA 



Dr. Wilson speaks of killers in the Antarctic as fol- 

 lows : 



Of the whales, the most prominent of all are the Killers, 

 or Orca whales, which scour the seas and the pack-ice in 

 hundreds to the terror of seals and penguins. The Killer 

 is a powerful piebald whale of some fifteen feet in length. 

 It hunts in packs of a dozen, or a score, or sometimes many 

 scores. No sooner does the ice break up than the Killers 

 appear in the newly formed leads of water, and the pen- 

 guins show well that they appreciate the fact by their un- 

 willingness to be driven off the floes. 



From the middle of September to the end of March these 

 whales were in McMurdo Strait, and the scars that they 

 leave on the seals, more particularly on the Crab-eating 

 seal of the pack-ice, afford abundant testimony to their 

 vicious habits. Not one in five of the pack-ice seals is 

 free from the marks of the Killer's teeth, and even the Sea 

 Leopard, which is the most powerful seal of the Antarctic, 

 has been found with fearful lacerations. 



Only the Weddell Seal is more or less secure, because it 

 avoids the open sea. Living, as it does, quite close inshore, 

 breeding in bights and bays on fast ice some ten or twenty 

 miles from the open water, it thus avoids the attacks of 

 the Killer to a large extent. 1 



In Japan killers are abundant, especially near Korea, 

 and I have seen numbers of the animals in the Bering 

 Sea and along the coast of Vancouver Island. The 

 Japanese call the killer "takamatsu" and in various 

 parts of America it is known as the orca, thresher, or 

 grampus. The two latter terms are especially confus- 

 ing and inappropriate, for the name thresher properly 



1 "The Voyage of the Discovery," 1905, App., p. 470. 



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