Killer Whale Classroom

A story by Jodi Frediani.

Killer whale pushing a common dolphin in the air during a hunt

Photographer and co-author of Wild Monterey Bay, Jodi has heard a lot of cool stories and witnessed many more first hand. Her own memorable encounter involves a well-know female killer whale doing what mom’s do best, teaching her offspring how to survive in the wild. A far cry from her distant relatives in captivity, this whale teaches us about the circle of life, while ensuring that her young have the survival skills they need to succeed.

JODI FREDIANI is an award-winning nature photographer focusing on marine species and the marine environment. Her images have appeared in numerous local, national and international publications as well as on BBC and in National Geographic blog posts. She has also spearheaded fluke identification efforts on the Silver Bank, waters of the Dominican Republic. She has been swimming with humpback whales there for the past 18 years and taking her own and gathering fluke ID photos from other swimmers there for the last 14 years. She is currently collaborating with CEBSE, an environmental NGO in Samana, on a comprehensive fluke ID catalog for the Dominican Republic.

Jodi was born in Los Angeles and grew up largely in the San Fernando Valley suburbs. As an only child, her ‘siblings’ were her family’s cats and dogs, parakeets, tortoises and chameleons, leading to a life-long love of, and interest in, animals.

When it came time to go to college she was unsure whether she wanted to study art, marine biology or veterinary medicine.  She told her parents she wanted to breed horses, but was assured that was just a hobby, and she needed a career. She settled on veterinary medicine, as it would allow her to work with animals, and she hoped to specialize in exotics. At the time, environmental and marine studies were in their infancy or yet to be born.

Jodi finally settled on U.C. Davis which offered a veterinary program, but after a year transferred to U.C. Santa Cruz, which had opened the previous year. She was not keen on the cow with a plastic window in its side or the irradiated debarked beagles at the Davis campus. At UCSC she studied biology and art, but took a long, circuitous route to finally getting a Bachelors in Art degree, with a focus on photography, many years later.

After dropping out of college for what she thought would just be one quarter followed by a trip to Europe, where she met her husband-to-be, the two of them returned to Santa Cruz, got married, had two children and purchased land in Bonny Doon just north of town. There they started an organic farm grew fruits, vegetables and dried flowers, and raised an award winning herd of dairy goats. Jodi still resides on the same land dubbed Yarrow Hill Farm.

Jodi traveled extensively with her parents as a child including trips to Europe and the Soviet Union, then continued to travel on her own and has not stopped traveling since. After her children grew up and her marriage ended, Jodi changed course completely.  She became a TTOUCH Instructor training animals and training people to work with animals. Simultaneously, she worked for 35 years as an environmental consultant, protecting forests and forested watersheds.

However, it wasn’t until the early 1990s when Jodi went on a couple of Earthwatch projects involving whales and dolphins, that she was smitten by the marine ‘bug’.  She went to the Bahamas on a project led by Ken Balcomb on beaked whales. However, weather conditions led to colder than normal seas and no whales were seen. On returning home, Jodi decided to check out the whales in her own backyard and went whale watching on Monterey Bay. She was soon introduced to the world of fluke identification by Adam Pack on Maui after joining his Earthwatch project a couple of years later. Curiously, she had had a vivid, memorable dream as a child about her family and a whale, which in retrospect seemed to have been prophetic.

In 2009, Jodi gave her first photographic presentation to the Monterey Chapter of the American Cetacean Society. She was then invited by Nancy Black to go whale watching with Monterey Bay Whale Watch whenever she wanted. Jodi took up that offer and has been photographing whales, dolphins and other marine creatures in Monterey Bay and around the world ever since.

Her latest venture is Wild Monterey Bay, a collection of real-life stories experienced and shared by a wide-range of people about their most memorable wildlife encounters on the Bay.

You can watch Jodi’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/zSftVopdsIk  

KILLER WHALE CLASSROOM 

So, the encounter that always rises to the surface for me, even though Monterey Bay is the kind of place that is just full of amazing encounters, happened about six years ago. And I think part of why it’s so important is it was one of those things where everything came together and then amazing stuff took place.

I was at home that morning. I was working on my computer, doing whatever, and at that point in time my cameras were always already packed and ready to go. The clothes I needed to have on a boat were in my truck. And the phone rang. It was Nancy Black, who was the captain of the boat I was going out on at the time, and she said, “We’ve just been out. We found killer whales and they’re hunting, and I’m taking the passengers back to the dock. Then I’m gonna turn around and take the boat back out again. Can you make it down here?”

Well, that was just barely enough time for me to grab my things, get in my truck and drive all the way down to Monterey, but I said, “Yup, I’ll be there.”

So, I get to Monterey, get on the boat, and basically, it’s Nancy, another photographer named Daniel, and myself. And we’re the crew. So we head out from Monterey, and we go back over towards Moss Landing. There’s another captain out as well at that point. He has no passengers. He’s just got a couple of deckhands on his boat, and he’s got the killer whales.

We get there; we’ve found them, no problem. And, it’s a female named CA138 and a couple of her offspring, and then there’s maybe one or two adult males. There’s at least one male, Fat Fin, who is an orphan that was adopted by this female. So, we’re trying to follow them and they’re … you know, Fat Fin’s off over there, and CA138 is propoising along over here, and her kids are porpoising along, and we can’t really tell what’s going on. We’re trying to follow them, and the next thing somebody says over the radio, “Oh, she’s got a harbor porpoise!”

And then CA138 turns and heads back towards the harbor. She’s only three miles offshore. Beautiful day, sunny, mellow, and the water’s calm. And as we turn around to follow her, we see her and she suddenly does this huge tail throw.  Tail comes up, and ‘whoosh’, big splash like that. Real powerful!

And I’m standing up at the bow. I’m clicking away with my camera, and I’m not sure exactly what’s going on at that point. But the next thing, I see CA138 sort of porpoise out of the water, and as I’m looking through the lens of my camera I see this bowling pin flying through the air! And I say something like, and I paraphrase here, ”Holy Crap!” But I’m just snapping away holding the shutter down, when she leaps out of the water, and this little porpoise or dolphin flies through the air. It lands on the water and the next thing I know CA138 has come over to her offspring.

At that point, I’m so intent on photographing that I don’t really see exactly what’s happening. And it’s not till later when I go through my images that I am astonished for a couple of reasons. One of which is, I got it all. And I got it in focus.  And the other photographer did not. And so, I had a series of photos that nobody else had. And in looking at my images, I could see this turned out to actually be a common dolphin, flipping through the air – having been batted by CA138 as she came up. She just like ‘boom’ hit it through the air, and it does a 180, and then lands on the water. And the next thing is CA138’s two offspring come over. You can see mom comes to check them out, and you can see the blood in the water by the mouth of one of her kids.

So basically what’s happened is a training exercise, where this killer whale has, well, her kids have helped her or at least followed her in the hunt. She’s managed to catch the dolphin, and if I look closely at the large files of my photo, I can see tooth marks. She’s had this dolphin – the marks are right on its back –she’s had it in her mouth. She could have just bitten down and that would have been it. But, no, she grabs the dolphin, well I’m not sure which comes first the bite or the tail throw, but she takes her fluke and she bats it to stun it, and then she does this porpoise out of the water, and with her head she throws the dolphin through the air. Now it’s completely stunned so that it can’t get away, and at that point her kids come in and they make the kill.

Not only was it photographically really exciting for me, but it was witnessing a natural experience of hunting and teaching, in the wild, so the whole thing was incredibly exciting. I was absolutely ecstatic!

And then, you know, the story and my photos got picked up by a top national Brazilian magazine. They ran with the photos. Actually, I think it probably started before that with a journalist I knew who had been writing for our local paper and then began writing for Wired, a national publication. She ran with these photos in Wired. Then the Brazilians nabbed the story. And then working with both Nancy Black and Alisa Shulman-Janiger, who knew the history of this particular female, I was able to write up the experience. And with Carl Safina’s assistance, I prepared the story, illustrated the story, and he ran it on his National Geographic blog.

So it was an overall experience for me that was just absolutely incredible. I still think about it all the time. CA138 is my favorite killer whale, and I can actually recognize her, which is pretty amazing since I’m not all that good at recognizing killer whales. But it was pretty exciting and it really helped give me a name in the marine photography world.