Fishermen spot pod of killer whales off Cape Breton
Bernie Lamey was hauling lobster traps on Monday not far off Cape Smokey, a famous Cabot Trail landmark, when a couple of orcas started circling the boat.
Within 10 minutes, the fishermen had spotted about a dozen. The orcas seemed to be in a playful mood.
"They came around our boat, bumped into the boat, rolled around, showed their bellies, [came] up and had a little look at us," he told CBC's Information Morning Cape Breton.
"They almost looked like they were more interested in us than we were of them. It was pretty spectacular."
Lamey said he knew right away they were killer whales by their distinctive black-and-white colouring.
"That's a pretty hard whale to miss," he said.
"We get to see all kinds of marine life out there.... Looking down in the water and seeing something that's only three feet away from you that's the size of your boat is pretty impressive."
At least one whale stayed several hundred metres away, but Lamey said he knew it was an orca, too, because its dorsal fin was nearly two metres tall.
"The fact that they were killer whales and the fact that there was 10 or 12 of them there at one time and they decided to stay and play for a few minutes was just an experience that I'll never forget."
Elizabeth Zwamborn, a marine biologist and a professor at Trinity Western University in B.C., runs an annual survey of pilot whales off northern Cape Breton.
They're black like orcas, but don't have white patches on their cheeks and have smaller dorsal fins.
It's possible to mistake juvenile white-beaked dolphins as juvenile orcas because they're both black and white, but Zwamborn said the videos and photos she's seen this week off Cape Breton are definitely killer whales.
Zwamborn said only one orca has been seen inshore in the 27 years the study has been running.
They're more commonly spotted farther out in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland and Labrador or in the Arctic.
Climate change is affecting the ocean's temperature, bringing North Atlantic right whales into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Belugas have also left the Gulf and headed to Cape Breton, but it's not clear why they wandered so far from home.
This year, orcas have been seen off Cape Breton near Money Point, Cape Smokey and Flint Island, Zwamborn said.
It could be the same pod, or it could be more than one.
"It seems like this is a time, maybe, that things are shifting a little bit," she said.
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