White orca calf spotted in Monterey Bay
An unusual white killer whale calf was seen Sunday in Monterey Bay swimming with its mother and another pod of orcas, one of just a handful of appearances since it was first sighted there as a baby in 2019.
A videographer took overhead footage of the white 4-year-old, nicknamed Frosty, swimming parallel to five other killer whales, which were later seen hunting sea lions. Because Frosty is small and narrow compared to some of the bulky adults and lacks their distinct circular white-on-black markings, it almost appears like a white dolphin in the lineup.
“It’s just striking white,” said Nancy Black, a marine biologist and owner of the tour company Monterey Bay Whale
Watch, who saw the white orca herself for the first time on Sunday. “The others are black, so it stands out.”
The orca is light black or gray on its head, which means its condition could be caused by leucism, which causes partial lack of pigmentation, or Chediak-Higashi syndrome, a disorder with the same discoloration effects; both can cause other defects. Unlike Claude the alligator at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who has no pigmentation at all and red eyes, Frosty is not albino.
No one knows Frosty’s sex, but scientists say it is part of a California group called CA216 of transient or Bigg’s killer whales, a subset of the orca species that is common in Monterey Bay especially in late spring. Bigg’s orcas got a lot of attention earlier this year after being caught in dramatic videos hunting sea lions and baby gray whales along the California coast.
Frosty has been seen in the San Diego area as well as off the coast of British Columbia, the northern and southernmost points of the orcas’ territory, Black said.
“He’s covered a lot of range with the family,” she said.
Another white killer whale was seen in the Washington/British Columbia area around the same time as Frosty and has since disappeared, Black said. Calves stay with their mothers — males for life and females until they have had one or two calves at around 15 and then leave to form a family of their own — so that must mean it died, though it’s unclear whether its condition had anything to do with it, Black said. That white orca had the same gray coloration on its head as Frosty and was in the same population, which makes Black think they could have had the same father.
A white killer whale calf known as Chimo, which had Chediak-Higashi syndrome, was captured from the wild and brought to an animal park near Victoria, British Columbia in the 1970s. It survived only two years in captivity, dying around the same age Frosty is now.
“We’re hoping it’s not going to die,” Black said of the small white orca in Monterey Bay.