Boaters stumbled across an unusual sight off the coast of the Florida Keys on Saturday: a pod of orcas.
Mike Slaughter and his friends found the orcas feasting on what appeared to be a shark.
“At one point, one of the orcas came out of the water and had a huge piece of meat in his mouth, you could smell it, it was really cool," Slaughter said.
A marine heat wave has been driving Florida water temperatures into the high 90s this summer, and orcas generally prefer colder waters — so how did they end up in the Keys?
Get top local stories in Southern California delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC LA's News Headlines newsletter.
A local marine biologist explains that it's not every day you see an orca in Florida — but it is possible.
"It's not like it never happens, but it's rare," Gerard Loisel said. "It's unusual for them to occur this far south."
It's even more unusual to see an entire pod of orcas, he said.
U.S. & World
News from around the country and around the globe
"The cases I've heard of before, where there were orcas spotted in the Keys or off the coast here, those were, like, individual, you know, animals," Loisel explained.
Orcas can be spotted "pretty much anywhere in the ocean," he says, but finding an orca near the equator is relatively rare.
Recently, though, encounters between orcas and boats have occurred near the coasts of Portugal and Spain more frequently.
"There was an usually high number of those kinds of incidents recently," Loisel said.
The incidents have been described as attacks by some, Loisel explained, but others believe that the orcas were behaving playfully and did not intend to harm the boats.
If you do happen to be snorkeling or swimming and stumble upon an orca, "you should get out of the water," he added.
Orcas almost never come near the shore and are more often found in deeper waters.
Slaughter made the right decisions when it came to finding an orca, Loisel said. He stayed back and remained on the boat, did not pursue or follow the orca, and documented the once-in-a-lifetime sighting on his phone.
