The Winner and Still Champion: the Killer Whale

You might have seen the big fight on TV the other night.

Not on pay-per-view or HBO, but right there on the nightly news, a brief but bloody bout between two of the wild kingdom’s most feared and notorious predators, the killer whale and the great white shark.

“If I could stage something like this, I would not be the struggling artist I am,” said David O. Brown, a former Cousteau Society researcher who has traveled the world making documentaries. “I would be well established in this world.”

Brown wasn’t there when a 20-foot orca took on a 10-foot great white earlier this week off the Farallon Islands west of San Francisco. But, like other shark and orca experts, he was very interested in the details of the encounter.

Although it might not have been the first altercation between these two heavyweights of the marine world--it had been widely accepted among marine biologists that killer whales and great whites generally avoid each other--this is believed to have been the first time anyone has seen such a battle, much less captured it on film.

Noted naturalist and shark researcher Peter Pyle, who spends much of every fall at the Farallones, happened on the scene with his equipment--he wisely used a camera attached to a pole for the underwater footage.

He wasn’t the only witness. Passengers on a cruise vessel sponsored by the Oceanic Society were also there. Mary Jane Schramm, a naturalist aboard the boat, told the San Francisco Chronicle that, while en route to the Farallones, a major breeding site for sea birds, they were told by radio that a killer whale had just attacked a sea lion.

They arrived to discover only a 20-foot orca and what was believed to be a calf about half that size.

“Then we noticed this dark shape moving in the water, giving the orcas a wide berth,” Schramm said. “The female suddenly veered off. I said, ‘I think we’re going to see something--she’s on an intercept path.’ ”

Schramm was right. The adult orca disappeared briefly, then emerged with the great white in her powerful jaws. The killer whale reportedly didn’t eat the shark, leaving it for her calf.

“The female apparently killed the shark, but she didn’t eat it--she was encouraging the calf to feed,” Schramm theorized. “[The calf] especially liked the liver. You know how hard it is to get kids to eat [liver]. Not him, though.”

TALE OF THE TAPE

OK, so the battle wasn’t all it was billed to be. It was as one-sided as most heavyweight fights these days. But keep in mind that the killer whale was a full-grown adult, and the white shark was a juvenile that probably had yet to develop a taste for blood.

“White sharks get to be about 18-20 feet long and in theory, a great white shark, until it’s about 12-14 feet long, is effectively still a juvenile,” Brown said. “A 10-footer is probably still feeding on fishes. It’s when they reach about 12 feet that they start preying on large mammals, such as seals and sea lions. And that’s when they develop that incredible girth.”

Still, Brown said, he would take the orca over even a full-grown great white under almost any circumstances.

“I’ve often had people ask me during lectures that, if I had to put money on it, who would I choose in a fight between an orca and a great white shark. I said I’d choose the orca, hands down, because orcas are team players and they’re so much more intelligent.”

Brown, president of Passage Productions in Santa Barbara, has witnessed killer whale-shark encounters before, while diving off Papua New Guinea in 1988. The killer whales invaded an area that was teeming with a variety of sharks, none of them great whites, but many of them large.

“They’d show up with sharks sticking out of the sides of their mouths lke toothpicks,” he said. “I saw one literally tear up an 11-foot shark.”

The killer whale involved in the attacked on the great white this week at the Farallones might not have had as easy a time of it as it seemed to those aboard the nature cruise.

Alisa Schulman-Janiger, a researcher for the American Cetacean Society, studied footage of the attack and said she noticed “wounds that look really fresh” on the face and back of the killer whale.

“From the jaw up, it looked white and raw and there were pieces of skin hanging from the wounds,” Schulman-Janiger said. “It was as if she had rammed the shark. They looked more like abrasions than bite marks. And there was also a wound back by the blow hole.”

Just why the incident occurred and whether there was a calf nearby is purely a matter of conjecture. The killer whale might have seen the shark as a threat to the calf, although Schulman-Janiger said she never saw a calf in the few minutes of footage she watched, which basically showed the killer whale swimming past the camera with and without the shark in its mouth.

The orca might also have been merely teaching the calf the fundamentals of being a killer whale, giving it something to practice on. Adult orcas are known to occasionally instruct their young this way.

Or the orca might simply have seen what it perceived to be an easy meal.

Fish and other marine mammals may be the favorite foods of orcas but, as Brown and others have learned, they have been known to snack on sharks from time to time.

“Orcas pretty much do whatever they want to do,” Brown said.

L.A.’S OWN

It was probably the first time this particular orca has made prime-time news, but it was not the first time she was photographed.

She was “positively” identified Wednesday afternoon by Schulman-Janiger, who has spent the last several years photo-cataloging orcas through distinct markings on their dorsal fins and saddles.

“I’m 100% sure,” Schulman-Janiger said. “You can tell it’s her because she has a very distinct notch on the base of her dorsal fin and a wide, gray saddle with unusual black markings along the top edge of the saddle.”

The orca, Schulman-Janiger said, is part of a pod of about 15 killer whales called, simply, “the L.A. pod.”

The pod was spotted frequently off the Palos Verdes peninsula from 1982-1990, then mysteriously disappeared from 1991-95. Schulman-Janiger believes it spent that period somewhere off Mexico.

Members of the L.A. pod have been photographed as far away as Bahia de Los Angeles in north-central Baja California in the Sea of Cortez.

The killer whale involved in the attack on the great white had been photographed 18 times before Saturday’s incident, as far south as San Benitos Island off the west coast of Baja and as far north as Monterey. The first time was in 1982, off Palos Verdes. The last time was in December, 1995, off Santa Barbara.

Though she is a member of the larger L.A. pod, she usually travels with a “core group” of one male and two other females.

“If there was a calf, that’s very exciting,” Schulman-Janiger said, “Calves have very seldom been associated with this pod.”

Asked how old the orca might be, Schulman-Janiger could only speculate.

“She was first photographed in 1982 and she was an adult then,” she said. “So she was at least 10-15 years old then. We really don’t know how old they get, but there are orcas that were photographed in 1968 that are still being seen today. The best estimates are that females live to be somewhere between 50-80 and males live to be about 40.”

MISCELLANY

El Nino: There were the northerly swells, generated by Aleutian storms, that slammed into California beaches for much of the last two weeks. There were 40-knot winds that raged across the ocean Tuesday. These two seasonal phenomenon, on any other year, would dramatically cool the ocean and effectively shut off the summer-like bite. But here it is the third Friday of fall, the ocean temperature still is at or above 70 degrees at the surface, and tuna and yellowtail are still breezing about local waters, as content as if this were August off Baja.

“Surprisingly, [the swell and wind] didn’t do much at all,” said Don Ashley, owner of Long Beach Sportfishing. “Normally, that would have rolled the water over and that would be the end of it. But those fish are still out there.

“In fact, my 10-year-old son, J.D. went out on a half-day boat [Wednesday] and he caught three yellowtail all by himself. They made him eat the heart of his first one [an initiation deckhands sometimes push on customers] and he didn’t like it at all. He said it was still moving when it went down.”

Cabo comeback? Larry Parker’s capture earlier this week of a 730-pound blue marlin generated a lot of excitement in Cabo San Lucas. It was the first sizable sign of life off Land’s End in months weeks, and several smaller blues caught before and after Parker’s have eased concerns that the fall fishing season--and the millions tourists pump into the Cabo economy during this peak period--might be a bust, as was the summer season.

“Sure we were worried, and there was something to worry about,” said Minerva Smith, on whose boat Parker, a tourist from Texas, was fishing. “We had 93-degree water and the threat of losing our bait fish [because of unseasonably warm water, blamed on, you guessed it, El Nino]. But [the bite’s] on now. The fishing is fantastic and everybody is optimistic for once.”

The 730-pound blue was caught, after a two-hour fight, on a 20-pound dead dorado.

Kayak attack: Fishing from a kayak is becoming increasingly popular along the Southland coast. Dennis Spike at Coastal Kayak Fishing in Reseda is partly responsible, having made a business of introducing others to this unique method of angling. He is holding a tournament Oct. 25 at Sycamore Cove Beach a few miles across the Ventura County line. Details: (888) 845-2925.

Showtime: The annual California RV show begins a 10-day run today at Fairplex in Pomona. Cost is $6 for adults, $5 for seniors and free for children 12 and under. Hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. . . . Rodale’s Scuba Diving is holding “Demo Days” Oct. 18 from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. at Avalon on Santa Catalina Island. The latest in scuba gear will be available to try. Details: (912) 351-6225. . . . The annual Long Beach Boat show will be held Oct. 22-26 at the Long Beach Convention Center and adjacent Downtown Marina. Cost is $7 for adults, free for children 12 and under. Hours are 1-9 p.m. weekdays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday.