---
title: "Orcas Have Learned to Kill Great White Sharks for Their Livers Alone"
description: "Drone footage, DNA swabs and satellite tags now tie the same surgical kill to four oceans, from Gansbaai to the Gulf of California"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-16T10:00:00Z
modified: 2026-10-16T17:38:46Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/orcas-have-learned-to-kill-great-white-sharks-for-their-live-ecf141
language: en
tags: ["sharks", "whales", "ecology", "predation", "climate", "science"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Orcas Have Learned to Kill Great White Sharks for Their Livers Alone

*Drone footage, DNA swabs and satellite tags now tie the same surgical kill to four oceans, from Gansbaai to the Gulf of California*

By Luis Goa · October 16, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/orcas-have-learned-to-kill-great-white-sharks-for-their-live-ecf141

## In brief

- A 1,100kg great white shark found dead at Gansbaai, South Africa, in May 2017 was missing its 90kg liver
- Two orcas nicknamed Port and Starboard, first seen in 2015, are blamed for dozens of great white and sevengill shark deaths since
- Drone footage from Mossel Bay in May 2022 gave the first direct video evidence of orcas killing a great white shark
- DNA testing confirmed a separate orca kill of a great white in Victoria, Australia, in October 2023
- The behaviour has now been documented in South Africa, California, Mexico’s Gulf of California and Australia

A 1,100-kilogram great white shark washed up at Gansbaai, near Cape Town, on 3 May 2017, missing a 90-kilogram organ. Her liver had been pulled out through a single wound between her pectoral fins. Ninety kilograms is 8.2% of her body mass, close to the 8-12% that marine biologists had already measured for white-shark livers — not the 25-30% typical of many other shark species, and nowhere near the 28% figure that still circulates in unsourced retellings of this case. [Alison Towner](https://bbc.com/future/article/20261015-sharks-washed-up-one-after-another-after-another-why-orcas-are-hunting-great-whites), the Rhodes University shark biologist who led the necropsy, had never seen anything like it: “We were like, ‘What the hell did this?’”

It wasn’t a one-off. Between February and June 2017, five white sharks beached at Gansbaai; four were missing their livers, cut out through the same clean incision, with tooth-rake marks on their pectoral fins that matched no shark’s dentition. Towner’s 2019 analysis in the *African Journal of Marine Science* put a name to the method and, eventually, the suspects: two male orcas first spotted off Cape Town in 2015, nicknamed Port and Starboard for dorsal fins that collapse to the left and right respectively. Dyer Island, the stretch of water locals had called “the McDonald’s drive-through for great whites” for the certainty of sightings there, went quiet. Towner: “I’m not talking about a gradual decline of great whites. I’m talking about overnight, gone.”

Why the liver and nothing else is a question of calories per minute of risk. A white shark’s liver runs 51-81% lipid by wet mass, almost all of it triacylglycerols and squalene, and carries an energy density of about 34 kilojoules per gram dry mass, according to a peer-reviewed lipid analysis of white-shark tissue. Squalene’s other job is buoyancy — it is lighter than seawater, which is why sharks without swim bladders don’t sink. One estimate making the rounds among researchers holds that the liver of a single 428-kilogram white shark supplies roughly an adult male orca’s full daily energy requirement. An orca that can extract a liver in under two minutes and ignore 90% of the carcass by mass is not wasting a hunt; it is running the most calorie-efficient kill available to it.

## Catching the kill on camera

For five years the case was built on bodies, not video. That changed on 16 May 2022, when a hobbyist drone over Mossel Bay, 400 kilometres east of Cape Town, filmed five orcas — Starboard among them — corner a 3-metre great white, roll it onto its side and bite into the flesh near its pectoral fins before diving with the carcass. Towner and colleagues published the footage and its context in *Ecology*, documenting what happened next to the survivors: a 3.8-metre female white shark that had been satellite-tagged in Mossel Bay on 25 April 2022 was last detected locally on 14 May, two days before the kill, then surfaced 400 kilometres away at Algoa Bay on 25 May. White sharks stayed away from the Mossel Bay site for at least seven weeks afterward, consistent with what [the Ecological Society of America’s account of the study](https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ecy.3875) calls a flight response rather than a gradual avoidance.

[![First ever drone footage of Orcas killing Great White shark (South Africa, 2022)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1WRpgMUXrgE/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WRpgMUXrgE)

Drone footage shot by Christiaan Stopforth off Mossel Bay on 16 May 2022 shows a pod of orcas, including Starboard, killing a great white shark. Video: The Daily Jaws · YouTube

**How an orca kills a great white for its liver** Sequence reconstructed from drone and necropsy records in South Africa and Mexico

| From | To | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Orca corners shark *(usually a pod, sometimes solo)* | Shark flipped onto its back |  |
| Shark flipped onto its back | Tonic immobility sets in *(shark paralysed, under 1 minute)* |  |
| Tonic immobility sets in *(shark paralysed, under 1 minute)* | Bite near pectoral girdle |  |
| Bite near pectoral girdle | Liver extracted *(under 2 minutes, solo kills)* |  |
| Liver extracted *(under 2 minutes, solo kills)* | Liver eaten *(~34 kJ/g, squalene-rich)* |  |
| Bite near pectoral girdle | Carcass abandoned |  |
| Carcass abandoned | Scavenged by sevengill sharks |  |

![How an orca kills a great white for its liver. Sequence reconstructed from drone and necropsy records in South Africa and Mexico](https://rews.cc/img/8120507a22c0aab671889608272d0ad0217c232b.webp)

Based on [Towner et al. (Ecology, 2022); Higuera-Rivas et al. (Frontiers in Marine Science, 2025)](https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ecy.3875)

Port and Starboard’s toll kept growing after 2022. Necropsy records compiled by Marine Dynamics, the Gansbaai tour operator that recovers most of the carcasses, logged at least seven great whites killed in 2017, including a 4.9-metre female nicknamed Khaleesi, and five more in August 2019. In February 2023 the pair killed at least 17 broadnose sevengill sharks and a gully shark in a single day at Pearly Beach, livers removed from each. Towner, quoted by [EarthSky](https://earthsky.org/earth/killer-whales-port-and-starboard-17-shark-livers-in-1-day/), called it unprecedented for the area and added that more carcasses had likely drifted out to sea uncounted. By June 2023 Starboard was filmed making a solo great-white kill, the hunting style he’d need no partner for.

The economic fallout is measurable. A study of sightings data from Gansbaai spanning 2009 to 2019, [published in the journal *Biology*](https://doi.org/10.3390/biology14070762), recorded 423 white sharks across 462 hours of direct observation — a mean rate of 0.91 sharks per hour that fell sharply in the study’s final three years. Wilfred Chivell, who runs Marine Dynamics, has said the Gansbaai cage-diving industry carried around 85,000 passengers in 2016 alone; [reporting in *Earth Island Journal*](https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/white-sharks-absence-from-south-african-hotspot-spells-ecological-and-economic-uncertainty/) put the recent booking decline at 20-30%, with one operator, Samantha Hansen of White Shark Diving Company, estimating roughly 50 lost bookings a year once prospective clients learn sightings are no longer guaranteed. Bronze whalers have moved into the niche great whites vacated.

Orcas are not the whole explanation, even in South Africa. A 12-year study at Australia’s Neptune Islands found that while orca presence does trigger immediate shark departures, five of six prolonged absences at that site happened with no orca sighted at all. Isabella Reeves, the Flinders University researcher who led that work, has said orcas “can absolutely trigger an immediate response from white sharks, but they are not always the whole story” — commercial fishing and shifting water temperatures are candidate co-factors nobody has yet ruled in or out with the same precision as a drone clip or a DNA swab.

![A large cream shark silhouette dominates a textured underwater scene with an orca, suspended diving cage, schools of fish, coral, and discarded fishing nets.](https://rews.cc/img/8ce21479669b0bb48e00cc4d691063c70e06b09b.webp)

## The pattern repeats worldwide

California has the oldest record. Two female orcas were seen attacking a 3-3.6-metre white shark off the Farallon Islands in October 1997, the first scientifically documented case anywhere. The behaviour was quantified two decades later: [a 2019 study in *Scientific Reports*](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39356-2) led by Salvador Jorgensen combined electronic tags on 165 white sharks caught between 2006 and 2013 with 27 years of survey data at Southeast Farallon Island. On 2 November 2009, 17 tagged sharks that had been feeding on elephant seals for months all vanished within eight hours of orcas arriving, most not returning that season; predation on seals in those years fell four- to seven-fold, and tagged sharks turned up instead at Año Nuevo Island. Unlike the South African cases, no Farallon kill has been filmed — the evidence there is entirely tag and survey data, a different method producing a consistent conclusion.

In the Gulf of California, Erick Higuera’s group has filmed a different variant since 2020: an orca family called Moctezuma’s pod killing juvenile white sharks specifically, the first documented case of orcas targeting young animals of the species rather than adults. [Published in *Frontiers in Marine Science*](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles/10.3389/fmars.2025.1667683/full), the paper describes repeat hunts in 2020 and 2022 at the same location and near the same calendar date, each relying on tonic immobility induced by flipping the shark onto its back. Higuera-Rivas calls the technique a passed-down skill, taught within the pod by its matriarch — a claim consistent with, though not proven to the same standard as, the orca ecotype research that documents culturally transmitted hunting styles elsewhere.

Australia supplied the first DNA confirmation. A 4.7-metre white shark carcass found at Cape Bridgewater, Victoria, on 17 October 2023 — two days after locally known orcas named Bent Tip and Ripple were sighted nearby — had its liver, digestive and reproductive organs missing and four bite wounds. [DNA metabarcoding published in *Ecology and Evolution*](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11770329/) by Isabella Reeves’ team found a 100% match to killer-whale reference sequences in the main, 500-millimetre wound at the pectoral girdle; the three smaller wounds matched broadnose sevengill shark DNA, evidence of scavenging after the kill rather than a second predator. Adam Miller of Deakin University, who ran the genetic analysis, [told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-28/killer-whale-predation-great-white-shark-confirmed/104820014) the result was “a bit of a smoking gun.”

**Four oceans, four kinds of evidence** How orca predation on great whites was confirmed in each region

| Region | First confirmed evidence | Orcas or pod involved | Key study |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Gansbaai/Mossel Bay, South Africa | Necropsies from 2017; drone footage 16 May 2022 | Port and Starboard | Towner et al., Ecology, 2022 |
| Farallon Islands, California | Direct sighting 1997; tagging data analysed 2019 | Unidentified transient orcas | Jorgensen et al., Scientific Reports, 2019 |
| Gulf of California, Mexico | Drone footage, 2020 and 2022 | Moctezuma's pod | Higuera-Rivas et al., Frontiers in Marine Science, 2025 |
| Victoria, Australia | DNA swabs of carcass, October 2023 | Bent Tip and Ripple | Reeves et al., Ecology and Evolution, 2025 |

Source: [Compiled from the cited peer-reviewed studies and BBC Future reporting](https://bbc.com/future/article/20261015-sharks-washed-up-one-after-another-after-another-why-orcas-are-hunting-great-whites). Each region used a different confirmation method: necropsy, drone video, DNA metabarcoding or tag telemetry

Whether this is new behaviour spreading or old behaviour finally being filmed is unresolved. Deborah Giles of the University of California, Davis, points out that drones and underwater cameras are themselves recent: “It might simply be that we’re looking for it, and we’re seeing it.” What isn’t in dispute is the baseline the behaviour is landing on. The great white shark has been listed as Vulnerable on the [IUCN Red List](https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/3855/16527829) since 2009, with the global population estimated to have fallen 30-49% over the last three generations — about 159 years — mostly to fishing. Four independently confirmed predator populations, using four different methods of proof, is the number worth tracking next: whether it stays at four, or keeps growing as more divers point cameras at the water.