iStockphoto / Kara Capaldo
A swimmer in La Jolla Beach came within feet from a pod of orcas hunting a dolphin. It seems impossible they wouldn’t have seen the massive orcas going after the dolphin but the swimmer kept their path parallel to the beach instead of heading into land.
A beachgoer captured footage of the close encounter which has since gone viral after it was picked up by ABC7 in California… Quick side note, the nickname for a pod of orcas is a “choir” or “opera” which comes from the beautiful sounds they make communicating with one another.
Watch closely as the swimmer comes from the left of the frame and swims right on by the orcas as they’re going after a dolphin in La Jolla:
@abc7la Close encounter! A group of surfers and swimmers narrowly avoided a pod of #orcas attacking a #dolphin just meters away off the coast of #LaJolla in SanDiego. 😨🐬
The same footage is available on YouTube Shorts if that’s the preferred medium to TikTok.
What makes this moment so special and rare isn’t that the pod of orcas is going after a dolphin, that’s just nature being nature, it’s how close it was happening to the beach. Rarely are orcas so close to the shoreline like they are in this encounter and everyone on the beach or up on the La Jolla Pier had a front row view to the whales. And that swimmer was literally within a few feet of the dolphin and the orcas.
That said, orca attacks on humans are incredible rare. And on the extremely rare occasions it does happen it’s almost always because the orcas mistook the human as prey or because the person was carrying potential prey with them in the water which is another reason why as the swimmer, you would want to distance yourself from the orcas going after the dolphin.