Just a few days ago, sport fishermen off the coast of Haina, just to the west of Santo Domingo, spotted a pod of killer whales, a truly rare sight for tropical waters. While the sighting was indeed rare, it was not at all unique.
Environmental journalist Marvin del Cid reports for the Diario Libre on the Orca (Orcinus orca) sightings that have been recorded since the 19th Century. These sightings have been generally between La Romana and Samana, but they had not been confirmed or documented with images until 2014.
In 2014, Alido Luis Baez was far out in the Caribbean, searching for dolphins, to monitor the species for the Dominican Foundation for Marine Studies (Fundemar). Five miles out from Bayahibe he spotted a pod of orcas and documented the small pod with his cell phone. This was the first visual evidence of the presence of this large whale so near the Dominican Republic.
Back in 2009, a sailor from Aruba photographed a pod of orcas in the waters near that island, and this set of the CWOP project (The Caribbean-wide Orca Project) in Venezuela and Aruba. Since that time, organizations in North, south and Central America have collaborated in tracking sightings of these impressive marine animals.
As of 2014 there had been 176 sightings, and as of now, there are about 300 or so recorded sightings on record. The report in the Diario Libre has an Instagram link to a video taken in Haiti in 2017 of an orca pod. It is impressive, to say the least.
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Diario Libre
23 August 2020