Are you team killer whale or team crab eating seal? We're cheering for both... Watch the movies in the show notes if you dare. There's no blood and guts but the hunting style of the B1 pod is still a complete horror show.

image: AlKalenski from pixabay, Antarctic seal and iceberg

Show Notes:

Lindblad Expedition with national Geographic movie

More National Geographic

Research Gate diagrams of wave washing

CBS 8 San Diego, killer whales attacking boats in Spain

We mentions sharks hunting seals in a very sneaky way: Marine Dynamics Shark and Whale Tours

Top 10 animals that kill people. Hippos are top of the list

Transcript

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Brain Junk. I'm Amy Barton.

[00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Trace Kerr. And today is everything you never knew you wanted to know about wave washing.

[00:00:13] Speaker A: Um, is this going a laundry direction or are we tumbling rocks?

[00:00:18] Speaker B: I know. You're like, it's a wave. Why do we need to clean it? We're not talking about that.

[00:00:23] Speaker A: That's good.

[00:00:24] Speaker B: This is the western Antarctic Peninsula. We're going cold. We're going, you know, a big sea with lots of little chunks of ice floating on it.

[00:00:33] Speaker A: No, thank you.

[00:00:34] Speaker B: Crab eater and Waddell seals versus killer whales. This one is not for the faint of heart.

[00:00:41] Speaker A: Ooh, this sounds like the Oatmeal is doing a cartoon.

[00:00:46] Speaker B: Who would win versus. Okay, so they look like the cute harbor seals you see in reels or TikToks, the ones where they're in the zoo. They got their cute little faces. They're about 600 pounds. Like I said, miles and miles of ice chunks floating on water ten to 20ft across. Crab eater seals or the Waddell seals, they rest on this ice. I would not want to lay on a giant floating ice cube like a crouton. But they're blubbery. They can do it. Okay.

[00:01:17] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:01:17] Speaker B: I've sent you a video.

[00:01:22] Speaker A: Okay. We're going to have a nice commercial first.

[00:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. And what Amy's going to be watching is how these killer whales hunt.

[00:01:32] Speaker A: Oh, I can skip the ad now.

[00:01:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And you're going to have a couple of seconds of preamble and then you'll.

[00:01:39] Speaker A: See this is the sort of place that has those beautiful big ice structures, too, that have, like, holes through them. Okay. And I'm watching an angry seal get sassy at some orcas. Okay.

Four orcas just swam under a chunk of ice and swamped the seal off of it. Yeah.

[00:01:59] Speaker B: That is wave washing.

[00:02:02] Speaker A: Is this what they also do to the boats now? This is a coordinated effort. That looks like a horror movie. Y'all.

[00:02:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's four of them. They're in a line. They come out underneath, like the boat that's watching.

[00:02:16] Speaker A: That's horrifying.

[00:02:17] Speake...

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