How fast are orcas

To a six-foot person that's mph. This site tries to understand how it feels to move like a fly, a squirrel, a cat, a rhinocerous, or a falcon. Speed of Animals killer whale Orcinus orca. Animals: land air water insect Your height: cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm cm feet meters Graph: top speed feels like Imagine what it's like for a tiny insect to jump and fly as quickly as they do.

They can grow up to 20 feet long and weigh more than 4, pounds. But killer whales are even bigger, growing up to 30 feet long and weighing 10, pounds or more. But killer whales swim just as fast, are stronger and hunt in groups, like wolf packs. And they have been documented, on occasion, eating white sharks, including in a famous incident that was filmed off the Farallon Islands.

Two years ago, five dead white sharks washed up in South Africa, having been killed by orcas. The killer whales had eaten their livers.

Jorgensen was lead author of the paper, which was published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports on Tuesday. They attached the tiny tracking tags using a foot pole and a small titanium dart. The records were gathered by researchers at Point Blue Conservation Science, a non-profit group, and other organizations. Both dolphins and orcas really impress when swimming at full throttle: bottlenose dolphins have been recorded at 54 kmh, with orcas coming in slightly behind at 50 kmh.

Both species have trouble maintaining such speeds over long distances, and will swim this quickly only when in hot pursuit of prey or fleeing from danger. Orcas are natural predators of dolphins, so the dolphin's slight lead can be a significant advantage in moments of escape.

While many theories abound about the dolphin's ability to reach such breakneck speeds, Jim Rohr of the U. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center says that much of the reason is that dolphins' bodies are "incredibly streamlined.

Orcas' bodies have a fusiform shape—this means the animal is wide in the middle but tapered at each end, which helps the orca cut through the water despite his large size. Under an orca's hairless skin is a layer of blubber, which contributes to the whale's smooth shape.

Orcas also use a swimming technique known as "porpoising," in which they swim just below the water's surface, then quickly rise up above it and back down in one quick move.

This technique helps the orcas preserve energy, since porpoising requires less effort than maintaining speed at one depth just below the surface.