Drone footage confirms orcas systematically hunt great white sharks off South Africa

On May 16, a drone hovering above Mossel Bay captured something marine biologists had theorized about for years but never clearly seen: five killer whales methodically hunting and dismantling a great white shark. The 30-minute sequence, recorded off South Africa's southern coast, shows the orcas pursuing, attacking, and consuming their prey with what appears to be practiced coordination. One of the five is Starboard, a male orca with a distinctive collapsed dorsal fin, long suspected of orchestrating kills alongside a partner named Port. The footage, now analyzed and published in the journal Ecology, represents the first detailed aerial documentation of this predatory behavior.

What makes the footage significant is not merely that it happened, but what it confirms about a pattern biologists have been tracking since 2017. In that five-year span, eight great white sharks washed ashore along the South African coast bearing unmistakable signs of orca attack. Seven of those eight were missing their livers. Several were also missing their hearts. The targeting is not random—it is surgical. Alison Towner, the senior shark scientist at the Marine Dynamics Academy in Gansbaai who led the study, explained that orca livers are extraordinarily nutrient-dense, sometimes accounting for as much as one-third of a shark's total body weight. For an apex predator like an orca, a single liver represents a concentrated meal worth the effort of coordinated attack.

Great whites are not small prey. They can reach 20 feet in length, weigh up to 5,000 pounds, and possess multiple rows of serrated teeth designed to tear through flesh. They are, in the conventional understanding of ocean food chains, the top. Yet in the footage, two orcas position themselves near a white shark while a third rises from below, driving the shark toward the surface. One orca bites down. Blood clouds the water. A piece of liver the size of an orca's head floats to the surface, where Starboard consumes it. The attack appears coordinated, almost practiced.

On the same day the drone captured this sequence, a helicopter pilot independently observed two more great whites being killed by the same group of orcas within a 71-minute window. The timing and location suggest the same hunting party was responsible for multiple kills in a single outing. This is not opportunistic predation—this is systematic hunting, refined through repetition.

What remains unclear is how this behavior spread among the orca population. Towner and her colleagues suspect cultural transmission: an experienced orca like Starboard teaching younger or less experienced members of the group how to target, attack, and extract the most nutrient-rich organs from an animal that has never before been part of their diet. If that transmission is occurring, it represents a fundamental shift in the ecosystem. Great whites have already begun abandoning their traditional hunting grounds in the area. In their absence, bronze whaler sharks—ordinarily prey for the great whites—have moved in, though orcas hunt them too.

The broader consequences remain unknown. The drone footage and helicopter observations have not yet produced washed-up carcasses from the filmed attacks, which means the full scale of predation in the region is still being assessed. But if the pattern continues, if Starboard and his group keep hunting, if the knowledge spreads through the orca population, the food web off South Africa's coast will reorganize in ways that are only beginning to be understood. For now, the great whites are swimming scared in waters they once ruled unchallenged.