Orcas hunting great white sharks have now been documented in several parts of the world, according to an Oct. 17 report from Geo News. The evidence behind that report, however, appears to come from separate regional studies rather than one new global paper.
The behavior matters because great whites have long been treated as the ocean’s top predator. Killer whale researcher Deborah Giles of the University of California, Davis argues the picture may be changing, or at least becoming easier to see.
“It might not be new behaviour, but because of the new technology we’re able to see it,” Giles said, according to Geo News.
What the studies show
The South African story began May 3, 2017, when a female great white weighing about 2,425 pounds (1,100 kilograms) washed ashore in Gansbaai. Its roughly 198-pound (90-kilogram) liver had been removed through a deep gash, Geo News reported. Shark biologist Alison Towner of Rhodes University said five more carcasses with similar wounds turned up in the following months.
Those early cases were inferred from carcasses. In 2022, a paper in Ecology described video footage of orcas preying on white sharks off Mossel Bay. The Ecological Society of America called it the first detailed observation of the behavior in South Africa. Geo News says two adult males nicknamed Port and Starboard are the most probable culprits in the earlier killings.
A separate 2022 paper in the African Journal of Marine Science tied the orcas to a flight response, meaning the sharks left the area. It reported that a pair of orcas had been killing great whites since 2017 and drove many of them from their largest aggregation site, according to Phys.org.
Sharks vanished from Dyer Island, which Geo News describes as one of the world’s best places to see a great white. “I’m not talking about a gradual decline, I’m talking about overnight, gone,” Towner said.
Later work widened the picture. A 2024 study reported that a single orca ate a great white in about two minutes, according to ScienceDaily. In November 2025, a Frontiers in Marine Science paper led by Jesús Erick Higuera-Rivas of Conexiones Terramar A.C. documented orcas hunting young great whites in Mexico’s Gulf of California, as CNN reported.
Ecosystem effects remain uncertain
Geo News says scientists have flagged knock-on effects from the disruption, including predation of African penguins, a critically endangered species. The report does not spell out the mechanism.
The Mexico authors were cautious. Their paper suggests juvenile great whites may be becoming a regular seasonal prey for those orcas and could face significant added pressure, but the researchers stopped short of firm conclusions. Geo News also lists Australia among the places where the behavior has been reported, and CNN has noted orca pods there have been recorded in similar behavior.
The behavior is also not newly recognized. The Ecology paper noted that only three studies had formally described orcas hunting white sharks and the sharks’ flight responses. For more on how great whites react to the threat, see our earlier coverage of great whites’ fear of killer whales.
How widespread the hunting is, and whether it is increasing, are questions the current papers leave open.
Source: Geo News, Ecological Society of America, Phys.org / Study: Ecology (Wiley Online Library), African Journal of Marine Science (via ResearchGate)
