About the Killer Whale Drawing
I first saw wild Killer Whales or Orcas (Orcinus orca) swimming freely off Vancouver Island. Their power, coordination, and effortless movement through the water contrasted sharply with my earlier memories of captive orcas performing before crowds. In the open sea, they were not performers awaiting a command. They were purposeful animals moving together through a world that belonged to them.
Orcas are the largest members of the dolphin family and among the ocean’s most formidable predators. Different populations develop distinct ways of living. Some specialize on fish, while others hunt seals, porpoises, large whales, or even sharks. Their calls and hunting techniques are learned and passed between generations, creating recognizable cultures. Many remain closely connected to their mothers and other maternal relatives throughout life, cooperating in finding and capturing prey.
Few examples demonstrate their power more dramatically than two adult males known as Port and Starboard off South Africa. The pair became notorious for killing Sevengill and Great White Sharks and selectively eating their energy-rich livers. Evidence from carcasses and direct observations indicates that the orcas bite sharks near the pectoral fins, tear open the body wall, and remove the liver with remarkable precision.
The effect extends far beyond the sharks killed. Research at Gansbaai, a renowned Great White Shark aggregation site, found that sharks fled following the arrival and attacks of these orcas. Sightings declined sharply, and white sharks eventually abandoned the site for two and a half years. Their disappearance altered predator relationships and caused serious financial losses to cage-diving, filming, and other shark-based tourism businesses. One of the ocean’s most feared predators had itself been driven away by something even more formidable.
Yet an equally remarkable fact is that wild orcas do not appear to regard humans as prey. They are physically capable of killing—and potentially eating—a person with ease, but there is no verified record of a wild orca killing a human. Only one well-documented bite is known: a surfer was bitten off California in 1972, apparently after being mistaken for other prey, and the whale released him rather than continuing the attack.
That combination of immense power, intelligence, learned behavior, and social complexity makes captivity especially troubling. A tank can contain an orca’s body, but it cannot reproduce the distances, choices, acoustic environment, family relationships, or cultural traditions of life in the ocean.
Years ago, I saw Tilikum performing at SeaWorld with my family, long before he killed trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010. At the time, he was simply the enormous orca we had come to watch. Knowing his later history changed how I remembered that experience.
Captured near Iceland at approximately two years old, Tilikum spent more than three decades in marine parks and was involved in the deaths of three people. No one can know precisely what motivated his behavior, but his life forced scrutiny of both the danger to trainers and the consequences of confining such an intelligent, highly social predator for entertainment.
Returning a long-term captive orca to the wild is far more difficult than simply releasing it. Keiko, made famous by Free Willy, underwent years of rehabilitation and eventually traveled from Iceland to Norway, but he never fully joined a wild pod and continued seeking human companionship. He regained his health and crossed open ocean, but decades of captivity could not be completely undone.
A young orca named Springer provides an important contrast. Separated from her Northern Resident family only briefly, she was rehabilitated with human contact minimized, returned to her home waters, reunited with her relatives, and later produced calves. Her success illustrates the difference between helping a recently displaced wild animal and reconstructing the life of an orca held by humans for decades.
Wild orcas still face declining prey, contaminants, underwater noise, vessel traffic, entanglement, and oil spills. The endangered Southern Residents were also depleted by captures for marine parks during the 1960s and early 1970s.
In Ocean Masters, I wanted to portray these animals as I remember them in the wild—moving together through open water with intelligence, confidence, and quiet authority. The broad sea and sky emphasize their freedom, while their coordinated movement gives them command of the scene.
The title reflects not only their position as apex predators but also their extraordinary mastery of the marine world. Orcas navigate immense distances, maintain complex family relationships, communicate beneath the surface, and pass knowledge from one generation to the next. They do not merely inhabit the ocean. In many ways, they embody it.
Ocean Masters is a graphite-pencil wildlife drawing of orcas (Orcinus orca) by Michael E. Dorcas for Tantilla Art.