Two orcas (Orcinus orca, aka killer whales) have been recorded demonstrating what seems to be kissing-like behaviour for the primary time within the wild.
The interplay between the orca pair, often called ‘tongue-nibbling’, is described in a not too long ago revealed research as a uncommon type of ‘affiliative’ behaviour – one which represents a social or emotional bond – and has solely beforehand been recorded in orcas held in captivity.
The interplay was filmed by snorkellers in January 2024 in a sheltered bay named Tverrfjorden in Jøkelfjord, one of many Kvænangen fjords of Norway, which is understood to host a seasonal aggregation of herring and cetacean predators.
The tongue-nibbling session lasted for nearly two minutes and concerned ‘repeated episodes of light, face-to-face oral contact’ between the 2 animals.
The behaviour was first documented in 1978 in a captive orca named Hugo, a member of the Pacific Southern resident inhabitants and former tankmate of Lolita – who died in 2023 after spending 53 years in captivity – on the Miami Seaquarium
Previous to the 2024 encounter, the one recorded footage of orca tongue nibbling was by an grownup pair saved at Loro Parque, on the Spanish island of Tenerife, each of which had been born in captivity to oldsters initially from the North Atlantic.
With these and a small variety of different incidents noticed in captive orcas, some scientists hypothesised that the tongue-nibbling might have arisen on account of their incarceration, though different indicators urged it was seemingly a pure orca behaviour.
Researchers famous that the tongue-biting was seen in orcas of various generations and from geographically distant populations, therefore it was seemingly a behaviour innate to your complete species, reasonably than explicit to a regional cluster.
An analogous behaviour has additionally been noticed in beluga whales, suggesting that ‘kissing’ could also be a type of social interplay unfold throughout a number of species of odontocetes, extra familiarly often called the ‘toothed whales’.
The Norwegian footage of 2024 confirms that tongue-nibbling is current in wild orcas and due to this fact not an artefact of being held in captivity. The scientists say that extra underwater research are required to higher perceive cetacean social interactions.
‘Traditionally, research of cetacean social behaviour have relied closely on surface-based observations from vessels or coastal vantage factors, which has severely constrained the flexibility to explain the subtleties and complexity of social interactions,’ write the research’s authors.
‘These methodological limitations have typically led to the grouping of heterogeneous behaviours underneath broad, catch-all classes similar to “socialising”, thereby obscuring distinctions between particular kinds of interplay.
‘That tongue-nibbling in killer whales – an interplay primarily expressed underwater – remained undescribed within the wild for practically 5 many years underscores the indispensable position of subaquatic methodologies in cetacean behavioural analysis.
‘Continued funding in underwater applied sciences and remark protocols is due to this fact very important to creating a extra complete and ecologically legitimate understanding of cetacean social methods.’
The whole paper, ‘A Kiss from the Wild: Tongue Nibbling in Free-Ranging Killer Whales (Orcinus orca)’ by J Almunia; J van Vliet; and D Bouma is revealed within the on-line journal Oceans.
Associated articles
Crowley (identified to his mum as Mark), packed in his IT job in 2005 and spent the subsequent 9 years working as a full-time scuba diving skilled. He began writing for DIVE in 2010 and hasn’t stopped since.
