The largest recorded Orca

[callmejoe9]

Okay, my preprint is finally out. It's a review on not just the size variation for the killer whale, but also two large beaked whales and the sperm whale.


https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/...5.610699v1

In my deep search of the literature, I've found that the largest verified weight for a killer whale was a piecemeal weighing of 9,950 kg taken from an 8.6 m male from the Antarctic that I mentioned years earlier. This was indeed among the literature published by Sleptsov,1965 (I had to visit a reference library to find this source). I've also ran statistical analyses on the weight relationships between resident killer whales, transients, and the Icelandic herring-feeding population and found that there was a statistically significant difference in the weight relationships, with the transients being notably heavier than the residents. The weight formula for transients is more similar to Type A killer whales in this regard. If the Soviet weight relationship for predominantly mammal-eating (likely Type A) killer whales from the Southern Hemisphere is used, the maximum size for a mammal-eating male (9.5 m from Nishiwaki and Handa, 1958), would weight 13.6 metric tons. In my review, there's some more info on growth parameters for killer whales and a lot of info on the beaked and sperm whales. Reply