Shamu is hungry, "Splash Section" given whole new meaning

Serial Killer Whale, must have a great lawyer!

To paraphrase Chris Rock - "that orca ain't go crazy, that orca went ORCA"

Not really, he's still in animal jail (aka the Zoo)

This just struck me funny:

Great! Any leads, officer?

Well, capital punishment is out of the question. We're going to need it to talk to that space probe at some point.

Zodiorca!

The Son of Shamu!

Jesus that must have been horrible to see.

From what I've heard, this wasn't during the big stadium show, but a smaller private show that's available at an extra cost. But it definitely happened in front of park guests.

Tilikum is pretty damn big -- he's at least 22 feet long, and his dorsal fin alone weighs about 200 pounds. He's the monster that comes out and splashes the audience at the end of the stadium show, and he's so big they don't let trainers in the water with him -- not because he's aggressive, but because he simply doesn't realize how much bigger he is than the trainers. What to him is just playing is deadly force to a human being.

The first incident in which he was involved saw a trainer fall in the water with him and two other female whales, one of whom had just had a calf, and so was very protective. As they had never been in the water with humans before, they took the trainer for a toy and tossed her back and forth between themselves. The second incident was some idiot who hid in the park after closing and snuck into the whale tank. Which is kept much colder than your average swimming pool. The guy ended up dying from a combination of hypothermia and drowning. He had bite marks on him, and there's debate as to whether Tilikum thought he was a toy or if he was trying to somehow move him to shore.

My wife works at the park and said the whole scene was absolute madness. It's about the most serious thing that can happen there.

Hannibaleen Lecter!

Jack the Flipper!

Just to give an idea of the size:

So you carnies try to breed true? Good to know.

I'm in no way saying the event itself is funny, but this video about it from CNN kinda is. Just the way the woman describes the scene, and then the comments of the anchorpeople at the end

"The image of the shoe... floating in the water..."

Jesus, that must have been awesome to see.

OK maybe the event itself is kinda funny too

http://www.clickorlando.com/news/22659901/detail.html

The guy was bitten by Tilikum and she pretended that nothing happened while he lay dead on top of her back!

I smell a horror movie deal.

You mean like that?

Although apparently the concept of ORCA is that Orca is just sticking up for his lady, which I never realized. This Tilikum character seems much more callous and bloodthirsty, so maybe there's room for two killer whale horror movies after all.

TILLY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER WHALE

The scary thing about Tilikum is that sometimes dead people show up and you don't know if she killed them (which she did) or just took a bite out of a drunk guy that drowned. She just pretends nothing happened!

Plus she does it either whenever she's bored, not for revenge! ORCA is more of a vigilante/revenge fantasy, I think Tilikum is an entirely different and horrifying thing.

Tilikum's a he. Keep calling him a she and you'l find out just what kind of killer whale he is.

Those crazy humans trying to teach killer whales tricks! When will they ever learn.

Cap's got a bottle of bleach just waiting for that motherfucker.

When, really, it's been Tilly teaching us all along.

Classic thread so far i'm loving it. What a terrible thing to see.

Pfft ... Tilikum can swim in a pool full of bleach, while she laughs at us.

I just watched something on The Discovery channel about how a Killer Whale took out a Great White..which kinda spooked all the other Great White in the waters for a while.

How many other creatures have Killer as a part of their name?

Only the most badass ones: killer bees, um, uh... killer... robots? Yeah I guess there aren't many

I watched a documentary a few weeks ago outlining the accidental discovery of an entire pod of orca slowly and methodically trying to drown and kill a Blue Whale calf that was being protected by it's gigantic mother. A tour group stumbled onto the scene - something that scientists up until then had only ever specualted about but never been able to document - and were there for hours as the pod adults trained their younger members on how to headbut, break up into smaller co-ordinated groups so they could come at the mother and baby in shifts so keep the momentum at a maximum at all times. After about an hour most of the people on the tour group had put their cameras away, children were in tears and the ocean was filled with blood. The attack went on for a number of hours tho - it was relentless.

We're talking about creatures with the intelligence of dolphins, and the ruthlessness of wolves.

It's kinda why I've never seen what point it serves to keep them locked up and make them do tricks.

But they're so adorable! Look at the tricks! Awwww!
AwwAAAAAHHHHHGGHGHGGGGGOHGODNO

Unless there's some unbelievable tale of orca rape that they're not telling the public, I think you can get rid of the about.

Maybe this whale is trying to tell us something. Like, get me the fuck out of here, assholes!

this post deserves some serious appreciation

This thread brings the CHUD funny, well done everyone.

Also, did anyone else find Orca incredibly disturbing as a child?

*raises hand*

Well, they've got roller coasters there, so you could have some sort of ride-related death, but the killer whales are their bread and butter. Something like this is pretty much a doomsday scenario. All Sea World parks have indefinitley canceled their killer whale shows, and that's a huge draw for them.

Particularly the baby orca miscarriage.

That's the bit that really sticks in my mind. The Whale looking into the camera just as it happens...

...and the baby looks like a big human foetus and then the father orca just screaming, screaming screaming.

Fucking hell that image seriously haunted my nightmares and I've never forgotten it.

I really need to see ORCA.

Yeah me to, I saw it when I was 12 thinking it was going to be just like Jaws.

I was about five or six and images from it - the one discussed, the orca knocking down Bo Dereks house and taking off with her leg, the final confrontation with the orca trying to spear Richard Harris through a giant ice sheet - have literally never left me.

I can't tell you what I did yesterday, but I've not seen Orca since about 1981-2 and much of it is still burned into my head.

The great thing about that scene is that Derek's character had her other leg in a cast. Not a good week for her lower extremities.

I sort of dig Morricone's score for this too, in all its cheesy glory.

Here's a video of how this particular show normally goes. At around the 4:50 mark, the trainer gets right next to the water and interacts with the whale, and that looks like it could have been where the incident occurred.

It is kind of strange to watch that and see how comfortable that trainer is with the whale, and how docile the whale seems to be.

And that may actually be the trainer who was killed in that video.

Orcas, the bad boys of the ocean.

I think it's great every time humans are reminded that we really have no buisiness being at the top of the food chain.

Wait, the Orca was using weaponry? My God, how did it come to that?

Same here, and that's probably why the movie kind of fails. It stacks the deck so heavily against the human characters that instead of being Jaws Redux, it works more as a Death Wish movie for orcas.

There's conflicting stories now. A lot of witnesses are saying the whale came up and grabbed the trainer, some saying by the waist, some saying by the arm.. Some are saying it looks like her ponytail got caught in the whale's teeth and she was accidentally pulled in. Sea World is saying she fell in. Some say there was a second whale, and therefore a conspiracy.

You just know some tourist is sitting out there with video of what happened, weighing their conscience against their greed.

I'm actually suprised said video hasn't shown up on YouTube.