#keffue

“Icy Waters”

This is something I have been meaning to paint for a very long time: subantarctic type D killer whales. They are extraordinary, the most instantly recognisable of all killer whale ecotypes (there are about 10 currently recognised). Unlike other killer whales their heads are bulbous and round, their backswept fins sharply pointed and their white eyepatches absolutely tiny.

And they have gone unnoticed for a very long time. The first time they were documented was when a whole pod came ashore in New Zealand in 1955. Back then people already realised how strange the whales looked, but thought it was the result of an aberrant genetic mutation for no other Killer whales like them had ever been seen before. From genetic material collected in the 1955 stranding researchers much more recently calculated that the type D's split off from all other killer whales as long as 390,000 years ago! It was not until 2004 that a live, at-sea sighting was made, followed by five more, which finally led to the ecotype's recognition and description in 2010. It wasn't until 2014 that they were filmed for the first time, and to this day they are known from only a dozen or so sightings.

They probably have a circumpolar distribution, living between 40°S and 60°S. The weather is bad down there, and that's probably why they have been discovered only so recently - there's just hardly any humans out there! Although they're sometimes seen near islands, they are more often found in deep offshore waters. Their preferred type of prey is unknown, but they reportedly steal Patagonian toothfish off of longlines.