Things I Learned about Leopard Seals and Killer Whales Today

I don't know about you, but I love learning about animals. It turns out, they're pretty routinely incredible and very interesting. Sometimes it's the small one's like jumping spiders, sometimes it's the really small ones like... I don't know, zooplankton, but most of the time the animals I end up reading about on Wikipedia are big predators. Today I learned about leopard seals and killer whales (orcas), and they're pretty neato. 

Leopard seals are cool!

A leopard seal is this giant blubbery seal that lives in Antarctica. That description alone should be enough to pique the interest of any zoophi-(oh shit, why they gotta steal that word!? I just wanna say I love animals not I LOVE animals!!) person who really likes animals. Antarctica is a hell of a place, It's basically Mars (in fact that's a topic for a later day), and yet these big bastards just chill out there all their life eating penguins all day.

They're pretty damn good predators. They eat everything from krill to emperor penguins and even other seals, and they need to eat a lot too because they can be over 12 feet long and weight 1000 pounds. Here's an image of their skull:

Yikes!

Look at those teeth! They actually don't have teeth that are very well suited for slicing, and there isn't really any solid ground for them to brace against to rip the juicy meat off a penguin since they hunt them underwater. So instead, they chomp onto penguins' feet and then violently just trash those birds. They slam them against the surface of the water to knock them out and rip them apart, and then they just go ahead and gulp up the bits that fly off without a care in the world. They do it a lot too. Apparently they're able to really easily catch penguins so they'll sometimes just play with them, I guess they do that when they aren't hungry.

Penguin: "fuck."

They're definitely dangerous. In 2003 a woman was killed by one of them when it dragged her down 200 feet below the surface of the Antarctic sea. During one of Shackleton's adventures in Antarctica one of his men was chased by a leopard seal and it didn't stop until another guy shot it. Apparently they made good use of the seal and fed it to their dogs or something. Too bad for the seal but that's just how it goes sometimes with humans; you scare us and we shoot you.

Still, there aren't that many recorded incidents of leopard seals attacking people. In fact there's even one well documented case where a female leopard seal tried to feed an underwater photographer some penguins. Clearly, beneath that nice coat of theirs, through the blubber, and beyond their terrifying skeleton, lies a heart of gold.

Eminently huggable

Killer whales are killer dude!

How often do you think to yourself "I wish there was a cool animal in the wild that was smart and had friends and didn't want to eat me, also it should be 25 feet long and live in the ocean." I certainly at least ponder the first part of that wish pretty often. It'd be neat if there were a bunch of other animals like dogs and cats and horses that were even smarter than any of those pets yet was more majestic than all of them combined (I'm imagining a dog-cat-horse right now, that's a low bar tbh). 

Whatever, you already know orcas are up next, it's in the title. Here's a picture of an orca jumping right the hell out of the water because it feels like it:

Current depth: -3 feet. Hell yeah

I'm sure I bored you with all the neat facts about leopard seals in the previous section so I'll cut right to the interesting thing I learned about orcas today. Nobody's ever been killed by a wild orca, ever! These 25 foot long predators will kill sharks, seals, tiny whales, and all kinds of fish, but every time in history that a human has ever interacted with one in the wild they've just left the human alone. 

In captivity, orcas are actually pretty dangerous. They've killed some trainers over the years and it makes me wonder whether those murderous orcas were actually really unhappy with how their trainers were treating them. They're really smart animals, after all, smart enough to mimic words people say, so I wouldn't be surprised if they did hold a grudge after their teeth have been filed off and they've been made into an actual freak show. Yeah, the conditions that captive orcas live in are not very great. In my opinion, it's animal cruelty to just keep an otherwise healthy orca in captivity at all because there's no way you could build a pen large enough for them to live in comfortably. 

I'd really like to get the chance to meet some orcas in the wild, I think it'd be a great experience in any event. If they decide to attack and kill me after all, I'd go down in history as the first person to ever be killed by an orca in the wild and perhaps future generations will study my life to try to determine just what I might have said or done to the orcas I met that would provoke them into committing such an unprecedented assassination. In the far more likely scenario in which they simply pay me no mind or even come my way and say hi, I'll get to see an orca up close in its natural habitat and that's really cool. Maybe I'd even get to bop one of them right on their funny snoot.  

"You could try, but you won't get your hand back."

Anyways that's what I learned about leopard seals and killer whales today. Come back soon and I'll tell you all about Jaguars and how they bite caimans right in the skull to crush their brain! YIKES!