A beautiful day with B-Slice and the family as they stretched out and enjoyed a day of foraging and relaxation. The family pod has been away for a while and with Orca able to travel up to 300 kilometres in a day their range can be vast. It was great to see them again today and baby Gabrielle was very excited, coming over happily for a meet-and-greet with all of our Pod Members onboard. It is hard to believe it has been a whole year since Bremer Bay Orca calf Gabrielle was born and seeing this little one doing so well is wonderful. The first year of life can be challenging for any wildlife, even our oceans apex predator. A calf will be susceptible to malnutrition, injuries from the powerful hunts they can be involved in from a young age or illness such as pneumonia if they are not putting on enough weight and increasing their body mass.
Thankfully the Bremer Bay Orca are overall a picture of health with all young calves observed to have been born over the last decade in this population not only surviving, but currently thriving here in the Bremer Canyons. The family was looking intently for food today but it was lean fishing, this can happen as the season changes and we start to see the Orca looking for additions to their diet with baleen whales soon becoming available to them in the weeks ahead. Our team are very excited to see what the next few weeks have to reveal as we transition further into autumn and witness the Orca and their hunting patterns change. It was also wonderful to see the local Bottlenose Dolphins earlier today making the most of the better inshore pilchard fishing while some rather round and sleepy Australian Sea Lions indicated they had also recently made the most of some good pilchard fishing today!
