09/17/2026
The real story: In early September 2026, Legacy Whale Watching in San Diego documented the Eastern Tropical Pacific orca pod — considered one of the least-studied orca populations in the world — hunting dolphins off the coast three separate times within about five days. The pod is typically seen in the region only once a year. Source: 10News/KGTV San Diego, published September 6, 2026.
The Eastern Tropical Pacific orca pod is one of the least-studied killer whale populations anywhere in the world — a group so rarely documented near San Diego that even seasoned naturalists expect to see them, at most, once a year. In early September 2026, they showed up three times in about five days.
"We usually only get to see them about once a year; this time we got to see them three times within the span of about five days," said Evin Rose, a naturalist with Legacy Whale Watching and an alumna of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Each sighting caught the pod doing what it does best and least-often gets filmed doing: hunting. "They've been hunting our common and bottlenose dolphins offshore," Rose said. Experts stress there's no cause for alarm to swimmers or boaters — orcas aren't a threat to people — but they do advise against entering the water anywhere near the animals while they're actively hunting.
Because this population spends most of its life in the warmer waters off Central America and rarely ventures this far north, every documented sighting adds real data to a population researchers still know surprisingly little about — what routes they take, how large the pod actually is, and why, this particular week, they decided San Diego was worth visiting three times over.
Follow Blue Depths for more real ocean moments, captured as they happen.
