Benevolent Orca Pods Are Adopting Baby Pilot Whales in an Apparent Effort to Clean Up the Species' Image

As so-called "killer whales" have made news over the past few years for violent boat attacks in European waters, marine biologists have noticed a far sweeter behavior in Iceland's frigid waves: the adoption of a baby whale from an entirely different species. In interviews with Scientific American, scientists described their shock at observing a pilot whale calf that traveled with an Icelandic pod of orcas over a period of years. One of those researchers, Chérine Baumgartner, said she and her colleagues at the Icelandic Orca Project initially couldn't believe their eyes. "At first, we were like, 'Oh my god, this killer whale calf has a problem,'" the researcher said of the bulbous-headed baby she and her team first spotted back in 2022. It looked at first glance like a malformed orca — until they realized it was no killer whale at all. The next day, when Baumgartner and her colleagues were witnessing the same pod again, the baby pilot whale was absent. Eventually, however, they star ... Read full article.