Nick Petrichow

speaker

224 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Nick Petrichow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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Nature Podcast · Briefing Chat: Orcas smashed a sunfish to bits — researchers aren't sure why · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

And speaking of like new things or learning new things, I wanted to talk to you about a never before seen behaviour of orcas where they seem to um well, to put it lightly, explode sunfish.

Yes, this is something that was quite shocking to the researcher who observed it as well, but we'll get into that in a second.

So yeah, as you say, orcas are the largest member of the Delphinidae family, so dolphins and the like, and they are predators and they hunt together quite often.

So there's been a lot of different behaviours that have been noted by orcas where they'll sort of like ram whale sharks and that sort of thing to try and get uh

Valuable meat.

But in this case, what this was was this was a single orca holding a sunfish.

So this is a great big funny looking fish that looks a little bit like a sun, that's the name, and they're holding it in their mouth while another orca not takes a step back, takes a swim back, I guess, and then rams at it at high speed, exploding the sunfish everywhere.

And so this is something that.

Uh I was watching in a nature video made by Maren Hunsberger, one of our colleagues who's appeared on the podcast, and I was reading about In the Guardian, and I also read the paper in Frontiers of Ethology, where they sort of detailed their observations and what it might mean.

I mean it's funny that you should say that, 'cause one of the things that the researchers believe may be happening here, and there's a few ideas because they're not entirely sure what they're doing, is that they could be processing the meat.

So rather than having a great big sunfish that might be difficult for, say, the juveniles to eat that have smaller jaws, what they might be doing is exploding it or, you know, chumming it in order to make the parts smaller.

for the other juveniles to eat.

But I will say the one of the most fun parts of this story is that one of the researchers behind this work was actually in the water with the orcas when this happened and was recording with a GoPro and there is a video and I'll link to it in the video you can hear them going, Oh my god, oh my god and something else that I wouldn't repeat on the podcast as this happened.

So it was quite a shocking event for them.

That's a very good point.

The sunfish was already dead, which is one of the ideas of why the orcs are doing this, as we said, maybe to process the food.

And they did observe that the juveniles did then eat the little bits of the sunfish.

So it was already dead.

So this isn't a hunting behavior.

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