An unusual encounter with a group of orcas near Iceland led researchers to discover a new and complex behaviour - they had taken in baby pilot whales, and not necessarily to eat them.
Scientists watched two encounters between killer whales and weeks-old baby pilot whales in 2022 and 2023 in a new paper published in Ecology and Evolution, and examined an earlier case in 2021, to come up with three possible reasons for the unusual behaviour.
