Divergent foraging strategies between populations of sympatric matrilineal killer whales

In gregarious species, collective behavior maximizes individual fitness benefits while minimizing costs. Despite the relevance of behavior to conservation, the link between the robustness of behavioral patterns across populations and population health is poorly understood. We studied the collective foraging behavior of two closed, sympatric populations of piscivorous killer whales, leveraging two contemporaneously-collected data sets from suction cup-attached bio-logging tags, to quantify patterns of fine-scale foraging movements and their relationships with demography. We reveal striking plasticity in collective foraging behavior between populations. Prey capture rate and foraging efficiency were greater for males in the endangered Southern Resident (SRKW) population, yet greater for females in the Northern Resident (NRKW) population. The presence of a calf (≤ 3 y) reduced the number of prey captured by adult females in both populations, with the greatest effect in SRKW, in which no mo..., ,