SAN JUAN ISLAND, WASHINGTON – It’s an image you often see on paintings and wood carvings – a giant totemic killer whale, with the images of sea creatures and faces artistically contained within the ...

Orcas display a variety of skills, like coordinated hunting and regional ‘dialects.’ They have also revealed several interesting habits, like grooming each other with kelp and offering food to humans.

New research on the eastern North Pacific has revealed that the mammal-eating killer whales off the West Coast are not a single roaming population but two socially distinct communities that rarely, if ...