The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands insular population lives within just under 60 nautical miles of the chain’s small islets and banks from Gardner Pinnacles (midway along the chain) to Kauai, with occasional excursions to the west side of Oahu in the MHI. The Hawaiian pelagic population is found up to hundreds of miles from the archipelago, with groups occasionally approaching as close as roughly 7 nautical miles of the Main Hawaiian Island. The MHI insular population consists of four social clusters that occupy waters mostly within about 45 nautical miles of shore, although some individual members have been tracked as far as 71 nautical miles away from the islands.

These insular populations overlap with an open-ocean or pelagic population. While generally considered an open-ocean species, in addition to the insular population around the Main Hawaiian Islands, another insular population is found around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The maximum age of false killer whales has been estimated to be over 50 years. Within pods, individuals may spread out over many miles when hunting, while smaller sub-groups spread apart and merge over periods of hours to days.

Provisions for Managing Fisheries Interactionsįalse killer whales are highly social animals that form social clusters, known as ’pods’, of related individuals that travel and forage together with no apparent lasting exchange among these clusters.

This article was originally published with the title 'Making Dolfriends' in Scientific American 310, 1, 19 (January 2014)ĭoi:10.Marine Mammal Commission: An Independent Agency of the U.S. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the marine mammals, “with their complex social behavior, are capable of engaging in equally as sophisticated mixed-species interactions,” he adds. “We observe giant moray eels and coral groupers-two distantly related species-foraging in a truly mutualistic and cooperative fashion,” Gregg says. It means that false killer whales and bottlenose dolphins choose to spend time with specific members of the other species rather than randomly mixing or engaging in brief opportunistic encounters.įalse killer whales are not the only creatures with diverse friends. “The fact that interactions between individual members of each species were observed regularly over the course of five years is an important finding,” says Justin Gregg, a research associate at the Dolphin Communication Project. The two species probably also benefit from working together to detect and avoid predators.īut Zaeschmar also found evidence of social contact between the two species, such as two animals touching as they swam side by side.

For starters, the fish that both mammals eat tend to be found together, “with the dolphins preying on kahawai and the whales preying on the much larger kingfish,” says lead study author Jochen Zaeschmar, a graduate student at Massey University in New Zealand. Some benefits of interspecies groupings may be purely practical. The study was published online in Marine Mammal Science. Some of the interspecies pairings lasted more than five years, with pairs spotted together at locations up to 650 kilometers apart. Using photographs to identify individuals by their distinctively notched dorsal fins, the researchers found that social pairings between individuals of the two species span both time and space. On the rare occasions that the animals were spotted, they were often accompanied by common bottlenose dolphins. In a new study researchers tracked the movements and interactions of New Zealand's false killer whales from a few dozen sightings spread over 17 years. They also form relationships that cross species boundaries. Past studies of individuals near Hawaii and Costa Rica have found that false killer whales are social animals that can maintain friendships-swimming, hunting and cavorting-for years. But humans usually find them only when they become stranded.īecause false killer whales are so elusive, scientists have only a basic understanding of their social lives. Named for their resemblance to their better-known cousins, false killer whales dwell in warm tropical and temperate seas across the globe. In the waters off the northern coast of New Zealand swims a group of one of the world's most poorly understood cetaceans.

False killer whale