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Rare Encounter With Killer Whales In FL Keys Caught On Video: Watch
Boaters in the Florida Straits filmed their recent rare encounter with a pod of orcas and jumped in the water with them: Watch
FLORIDA KEYS, FL — Boaters in the Florida Straits filmed their recent rare encounter with a pod of orcas and some even jumped in the water with the killer whales. (Watch a video of the whales below.)
The group was fishing out of Key Largo when they came across the pod, Mike Slaughter, who shared multiple videos from the encounter on social media, wrote in an Instagram post.
“They had just killed something and there was a lot of blood in the water. It was amazing and a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Slaughter wrote.
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In one of the videos, a boater can be heard saying, “You see that dead thing on the surface?”
Another voice is heard saying, “Look at the blood in the water.”
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“At one point, one of the orcas came out of the water and had a huge piece of meat in his mouth, you could smell it, it was really cool," Slaughter told NBC6 South Florida.
“This ain’t SeaWorld, folks,” another boater said. “Anybody want to go swimming?”
A few of the boaters grabbed snorkeling gear and got into the water with the whales, the videos show.
It’s rare to see orcas off the coast of Florida as they more commonly tend to stick to colder waters — usually off Antarctica, Norway and Alaska — according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.
They can be found in tropical and subtropical waters, though, and have been found from California to Russia, the agency said.
One South Florida marine biologist told NBC that it’s unusual to see orcas in Florida waters.
"It's not like it never happens, but it's rare," Gerard Loisel said. "It's unusual for them to occur this far south.”
While individual orcas might occasionally be found in waters off the coast of the Sunshine State, it’s rare to see pods of them, he added.
Jeremy Kiszka, a marine mammal scientist and professor at Florida International University, told the Miami Herald that there were at least four female killer whales and one male in Slaughter’s video.
Watch a video of the boaters' encounter with the killer whale pod:
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