re: Anyone ever seen killer whales in the Gulf before?

They are escaping the blazing hot arctic circle brought on by conservatives.

quote:

---

I wonder how they taste?

---

sort of like a mix of manatee and bald eagle

Beautiful! Thanks for sharing.

I’ve seen whales when fishing out of Venice in blue water, no idea on the actual species.

quote:

---

First, you make a roux

---

Careful, you start hunting them, they might start hunting us. There are examples of them sinking boats on purpose and other things to mess with humans but not eating them. Very possible it’s just because we don’t taste good or they have a cultural taboo against it, if they want to start eating us, would make oceans very dangerous.

LINK

quote:

---

While all killer whales are considered one species (for now, there has been recent conversation about splitting them into separate species or subspecies) they can be differentiated by physical characteristics like fin shape, size, and saddle patches, and by behavior. Each group specializes on a specific diet which rarely overlaps. There are some which eat only fish, others which eat only marine mammals, and some which are more general hunters. In some instances, fish-only orcas have been seen playing with and killing marine mammals but not eating them, even when their group is starving.

The leading explanation for why they would do that is a cultural taboo against eating marine mammals, even when it’s a suitable food source and you really need it. Something similar might be at work when it comes to humans. In 2005, a 12-year-old was swimming in Helm Bay when an orca rushed him. Observers reported that it looked like the animal was going to attack, then at the last minute it seemingly recognized he was human and “bent its body in half to flip around and go back out to sea,” reports Newsweek.

"I don’t think a killer whale would ever hunt a human. They are fussy eaters, really conservative in terms of whatever they learned from their mothers and from their pod about what constitutes food," Erich Hoyt, author of Orca: The Whale Called Killer, told Live Science.

While orcas might have a cultural rule against eating humans, that might not say anything about their particular opinion of us. Orcas seem to have a strict diet defined by what their mothers feed them. If that’s the case, humans stay off the menu only because we’ve never been on the menu before. It’s probably in our interest to keep it that way, and that might mean giving orcas a little more breathing room to do their thing.

---

My Uncle saw some off a rig back in the 90s. He said they would come around in the winter time.

I have seen a few whale sharks from production platforms in the GOM

I saw a pod of orcas when I was riding the crew boat from Santa Barbara CA to an ExxonMobil platform

even the Orcas are moving down south to escape the west coast