🙏 I’m also grateful to the many students, fieldwork participants, colleagues, and collaborators involved in the Icelandic Orca Project who helped make this fieldwork and data collection possible.
Our study confirms the highly social and cooperative nature of tail-slap feeding in killer whales and provides a novel method for estimating group-level feeding rates 🐟.
🔊 A "slurping" sound was also recorded during 26% of video-confirmed consumption events, allowing us to estimate a mean (± s.d.) of 29.7 ± 25.3 herring consumed per tail-slap by the foraging group.
🎯 We found evidence of potential role specialisation, with three tagged whales repeatedly occupying the "tail-slapping" role more often than expected by chance (p < 0.05).
💖A huge thank you to my co-authors, @fipsamarra.bsky.social, Dr. Paul Wensveen, Anokhi Saha, Giorgia Giovannini, Dr. Kagari Aoki, Prof. Katsufumi Sato, and my supervisor Prof. Patrick Miller for their support and contributions to this work.
Herring-eating killer whales in Iceland use a highly coordinated foraging strategy known as tail-slap feeding. Whales herd herring into dense schools and strike them with their flukes, stunning fish before consuming them individually.
🎥 See tail-slap feeding in action in the video below!
🎉 Excited to share our new paper on cooperative feeding in killer whales .
Using animal-borne audio and video data, we investigated tail-slap feeding, found evidence of role specialisation, and developed a novel acoustic method to estimate group-level feeding rates.
📖 doi.org/10.1098/rsos...
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Ellen Hayward
Ellen Hayward
Ellen Hayward
Abstract. Group hunting is a widespread phenomenon, fundamentally shaping predator social dynamics and trophic interactions with their prey. The foraging b
