Key takeaways
- Tall and columnar is a humpback. Low and bushy is an orca.
- A tall black blade against a small fin on a hump.
- A humpback lifts its flukes to dive. An orca does not.
- Orcas surface in rhythm together. Humpbacks are looser and often alone.
Two animals with nothing in common but lunch
It is easy to file these together as whales that turn up in the same fjord in the same month, and they could hardly be less alike.
An orca is a toothed predator and the largest of the dolphins, hunting in a family group, taking individual fish, capable of complex coordination and speed. A humpback is a baleen whale that filters its food, straining vast mouthfuls of seawater through plates in its jaw, generally travelling alone or in loose company.
The humpback is much bigger, reaching well beyond the length of a male orca and several times the weight. It is also slower, more ponderous at the surface, and considerably more likely to do something spectacular like throw itself out of the water entirely.
They meet here because both eat herring, by completely different methods, from the same shoals.
The blow, which is usually the first thing you get
In cold air a whale's breath condenses, and the shape of that cloud is the first identification you can make, often before anything else is visible at all.
A humpback blow is tall and vertical, a column of vapour that can rise several metres and hangs long enough to point at. On a still day it is visible from a very long way off and is the reason a spotter scans the horizon rather than the water.
An orca blow is low, quick and bushy, a metre or two at most, and it disperses fast. If you are struggling to see a blow at all and there are clearly whales there, they are probably orcas.
Sound helps too. Both are audible across flat water when the engines are down, and a humpback's exhalation is deeper and longer than the sharp puff of an orca.
Flukes lifted against the sky, which only one of these animals does
The fin, once you can see the animal
The dorsal fin settles it beyond argument.
An adult male orca carries a tall, straight, black blade that can stand close to two metres out of the water and looks improbable the first time you see it. Females and young animals have a smaller fin that curves backwards, but it is still a distinct triangular fin on a smooth black back with a pale grey saddle behind it.
A humpback has a small fin, sometimes barely a bump, and it sits on a raised hump toward the rear of a very long dark back. The proportions are the giveaway: a great deal of animal rolling past, and a modest fin near the end of it.
Colour helps in good light. Orcas are sharply black and white with a clear eye patch. Humpbacks are dark grey to black with knobbly heads and enormous white-edged flippers, which under water glow a startling pale turquoise before the animal reaches the surface.
How they behave in front of you
Watch for a minute and the rhythm tells you as much as the shape does.
Orcas surface in company and often in synchrony, several animals rising and blowing within seconds of each other, then down and up again on a short repeating cycle. A travelling pod moves in a consistent direction at a consistent speed and looks organised, because it is.
A humpback surfaces several times in a row to breathe, arches its back higher on the last one, and then goes down for a long dive. It is a slower pattern with real gaps in it, and it is much easier to lose the animal between surfacings.
The single most reliable behavioural difference is the tail. A humpback lifts its flukes clear of the water as it begins a deep dive, and the underside pattern of those flukes identifies the individual. An orca does not do this. If you have seen a tail held up against the sky, you have seen a humpback.
None of this needs binoculars or expertise. It needs about sixty seconds of watching the same animal instead of swinging the camera at every splash, which is the hardest discipline on any wildlife boat and the one that decides how much you actually see.
When they are in the same water
The interesting case is both at once, which happens here regularly and is worth understanding rather than just enjoying.
Orcas do the work of concentrating a herring shoal into a tight ball. A humpback arriving at that ball takes a huge mouthful of the fish they gathered. The orcas cannot prevent it and generally do not try.
So a mixed sighting usually means you have found an orca hunt with a large uninvited guest at it, not two species peacefully sharing. Look for the gulls first, then the fins, then the very large dark back coming up through the middle of everything.
Neither animal is in danger from the other. The orcas here eat fish, and a humpback is in no sense on the menu for a population that has specialised in herring for generations.
It is also the answer to the question people ask when both appear at once, which is whether something is about to go wrong. Nothing is. They are two predators at the same buffet, and one of them is very much better at queue-jumping.
