While 100% a species of dolphin i want to point out those are ORCAS. if anyone got confused for a second like i did. Those are fucking orcas. Holy shit that is a giant fucking whale.
If you really wanna get a sense of just how fucking big blue whales really are, then consider the fact that the dolphins swimming in front of this whale are over two metres long
guys, just, no. these are likelypacific whitesided dolphins, a criminally adorable cetacean found in the North Pacific that does indeed average at around 2.3-2.5 meters long.
now THIS is an orca, pictured here in the act of headbutt-murdering a common dolphin right into fucking oblivion. (common dolphins are about the same size as the pacific whitesided dolphin, for scale.)
that’s right, orcas max out at an astonishing 25 feet long, or well over 7 meters. that’s almost a quarter as long as that blue whale, and is just generally way too fucking big to deal with today when you remember that we’re talking about an apex predator the size of a minibus. they’re simply too big to be mistaken for anything else in the ocean!
orcas eat a wide variety of foods depending on their location, from herring to that really unfortunate common dolphin up there (rip.) if I really wanted to give the lowdown on them I’d be here all day, but I’ll tell you that orcas are also the only known predator tohunt and kill blue whales. so lets just be glad it’s only the dolphins in that first pic!
