Luxury Galápagos Cruises

Can Killer Whales Really Kill a Whale Shark? Inside a Brand-New Scientific Discovery Picture the largest fish in the ocean — longer than a city bus, patterned with pale spots like a starlit night, drifting calmly through open water with its mouth open, filtering plankton. The whale shark has no reason to expect trouble. It has no real predators. Nothing hunts something that size. Except, it turns out, something does. In 2022 and again in 2023, researchers working with tour operators in Panama and Ecuador documented something that had never been formally recorded in those waters before: killer whales deliberately hunting,

Do Killer Whales Have Families? What 26 Years of Galápagos Photographs Reveal Ask most people whether killer whales have families, and they’ll say yes without hesitating — probably picturing a devoted matriarch leading her pod through cold, grey water, her children and grandchildren never straying far for their entire lives. It’s a beautiful image, and for one of the best-studied orca populations on Earth, it’s also true. But sail two thousand miles south to the Galápagos Islands, sitting almost exactly on the equator, and that tidy picture starts to come apart. Here, researchers spent 26 years photographing the same killer whales,