A sea captain was forced to give a sea lion to hungry killer whales near Vancouver Island in Canada’s Pacific coast.
In a TikTok video that has gone viral, the sea lion jumped to the boat in an effort to escape the hungry orcas.
“An orca looks right up at me,” TikTok user @nutabull captioned the video. “Where’s my lunch, b****? Give it up now!”
“What the [redacted],” the female captain said, panicking and referring to the sea lion on her boat. “No, no, no, no – do you see what just came up on my boat?”
In the video, the terrified sea lion can be seen looking back at the woman, while she records the situation and showed at least three orca whales circling around the vessel.
As the woman tells the sea lion repeatedly that it has ‘gotta go’ and ‘get in the water’ the animal stares back at her, seemingly telling her to hit the gas and just get out of there.
“Oh my God, I don’t know what to do,” she said, panicking.
“I know you’re supper, honey,” the woman told the wide-eyed seal as the orcas swam around her boat. “This is how the world works.”
After about four minutes of telling the ill-fated seal to go away, the animal slides off the boat and she speeds away, looking back at the spot where the sea lion dove into the water.
At the time of this writing, the video has since been taken down on TikTok. But hundreds of commenters on Twitter have put themselves in the ship captain’s shoes, discussing how they would have reacted to the situation.
Some people wondered why the woman didn’t simply speed away and bring the sea lion to safety. But things aren’t that simple.
In many harbors, it is illegal to turn on ship engines within a certain distance of endangered animals like orcas.
“I can’t,” the woman responded in a TikTok comment on the now-deleted video. “Can you imagine starting the boat and taking off and the propeller hits one of the 250 only orcas alive – to the 2 million sea lions?”
While an orca has never killed a human in history, they were seen working together to tip huge ice floes to catch escaping prey.
According to a New York Post report last year, a group of orcas rammed small boats to tip them over off the coast of Spain, tormenting 33 seafarers.
“Listen, I know wild orcas don’t generally go for humans, but if I was in that situation I would panic,” @mitkitty1 commented. “Kinda hard to stay calm and think about orca facts when there are three giant hungry apex predators around you.”
Meanwhile, some users said that they would have acted more nobly under the same situation, and save the poor seal while others had a less altruistic take.
“Someone like me would have fought the orcas to save the sea lion, but [I get] we’re all different,” user @Br3ADB0Y wrote.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not gonna disrupt the food chain before the food chain disrupts me,” @miyahbortion wrote.
“I don’t think it’s so much about WANTING to send it to its death so much as it is not wanting to JOIN IT on the orca’s menu,” @Henryjeromekni2 commented.
“Honestly she didn’t have to do a thing,” one user argued. “The seal was safe and those whales wouldn’t have capsized her boat. If she fired up her engine the whales would’ve left.”
Recommended Video For You!
Whale Bursting Through The Waves