Video Captures Orcas Ramming a Sunfish So Hard It Explodes. The Mysterious Behavior Might Be a Form of Play or Juvenile Care
In two incidents documented in Mexico’s Gulf of California, orcas worked together to blast sunfish into smithereens after they had killed the enormous animals
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A female orca gripped the back end of a sharp-tail sunfish in her mouth, holding relatively still as she stabilized the animal in front of her body. Kathryn Ayres, a research scientist with the nonprofit Beneath the Waves, watched as a second orca approached at a high speed, crashing headfirst into the fish with an audible boom.
The sunfish’s tissue broke apart “into thousands of pieces,” Ayres says in a statement. As the orcas circled, the fragments of the fish floated through the water like shards of confetti.
In a paper published today in Frontiers in Ethology, scientists describe this incident and one other case of the novel orca behavior, which they call “ram to fragment,” in Mexico’s Gulf of California.
Surprisingly, the high-energy ram is not the fatal blow—in both instances, the sunfish had already been killed by the orca pod before the cetaceans worked together to explode it. This suggests the behavior is not a hunting strategy, but rather a technique to process food.
“This requires acute spatial awareness, acoustic communication and a shared understanding of physics,” says study co-author Erick Higuera, a marine biologist and executive director of Orcas México, to Smithsonian magazine. “It shows that orcas can mentally map out a multistep tactical plan and execute it with military precision.”
The sharp-tail sunfish is one of the heaviest fish in the world; it can weigh over 4,400 pounds and grow longer than nine feet in length. The orca, meanwhile, is an apex predator known for its hunting prowess. Scientists are still working to understand the interactions between these species in the Gulf of California, but they’ve documented a handful of predation events in which orcas have eaten sunfish. Typically, the carnivores target the fish’s pectoral fins, then create a wound in the body to consume its internal organs. But all this had already occurred by the time the orcas slammed into the sunfish like living torpedoes.
Higuera first saw the ram-to-fragment behavior in the Gulf of California in December 2021. “The energy of the impact was astounding,” he says. “We immediately knew we were witnessing something highly unusual due to the magnitude of the tissue explosion.” Still, it wasn’t until he went back to the footage, frame by frame, that he realized one orca was stabilizing the sunfish while the other carried out the blow.
“This wasn’t a random attack,” he says, “but a highly coordinated processing technique by multiple individuals.”
The team wanted to wait for higher-quality footage before publishing a description of the behavior. That breakthrough came with Ayres’ video from 2024. Then, in September 2025, digital creator Héctor Franz caught another incident on camera.
In 2024, after Ayres watched the two adult orcas blast the sunfish to bits, a juvenile orca consumed some of the smaller fragments. The adults ate from what remained of the intact body but didn’t eat the smaller pieces. This suggests the behavior was meant to benefit the young orca—by blowing the sunfish apart, the adults could circumvent its tough, rubbery skin and separate the prey into bite-size pieces that are more manageable for a juvenile’s jaw. A calf was nearby during the second incident, too, and it ate from the primary carcass.
The ram-to-fragment sequence could also be a way for the mammals to have fun. “Orcas are known for playing with their food,” Ayres says in the statement. The species is also notorious for picking up on trends and learning new behaviors; other populations of orcas have historically worn dead salmon as hats in the northeast Pacific Ocean, broken rudders off ships in the Strait of Gibraltar and removed the livers from great white sharks after a hunt.
Higuera favors a dual explanation—because juveniles were present in both recorded incidents, the adults may have been teaching them to process the sunfish, he notes. This supports the idea that the behavior relates to social bonding, play or cognitive stimulation.
“In highly intelligent social mammals, play is rarely just ‘entertainment’; it’s the primary mechanism for practicing complex motor skills, strengthening team coordination and sharing a collective experience,” Higuera says. Ramming the sunfish may be “a playful and innovative shortcut that also provides excellent food for young individuals.”
“Orca society is very complex,” Michael McGowen, a research scientist and curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the study, says to Smithsonian magazine. “I think more events like these need to be documented, but this could be the result of a culturally unique way of processing prey in this population or region.”
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Orcas in Antarctica might work together to create waves that wash prey animals, like seals, from ice floes, landing them in the water where the predators can strike. Some orcas even launch their bodies onto sandy or rocky shores to snatch seals in places like British Columbia and Patagonia.
Totally obliterating a sunfish could also offer orcas a boost in nutrition. Just beneath the skin, sunfish have a thick, collagen-rich layer called the capsule, which is nearly 90 percent water and helps promote buoyancy. The capsule hosts its own distinct community of microbes, which get released when orcas shatter the sunfish tissue. These may bring nutritional or immune benefits to the orcas and “might have hidden, microscopic ripple effects on the local ecosystem,” Higuera notes. But verifying this idea will require more data.
The team also wants to look into whether the behavior is practiced by other pods around the world and whether it’s spreading in the Gulf of California. They could not determine whether it was the same orcas in both videos.
Higuera notes that the observations for this study were enabled by a partnership between professional scientists, eco-tour operators and citizen scientists with cameras and drones. But the growth of tourism in the region, he adds, can also pose a threat to orcas and disturb their behavior. Last year, Mexico’s environment ministry released a plan to regulate swimming with orcas in a specific zone.
“If we can protect these animals by maintaining a respectful distance,” Higuera says, “this ongoing partnership will allow us to safely document hidden mysteries of marine life that would otherwise remain completely closed to science.”