They live on meat. Primarily salmon, but they need a whole bunch daily to sustain themselves. They are extremely smart and hunt and live in pods. They teach each other and our truly incredible creatures. I learned a lot about them on my trip. You can google killer whale vs. great white and find some unreal footage by a marine biologist off of Northern California.
Thanks for the mention. Cool.
From UC Santa Cruz paper:
...calculated that an adult female, weighing approximately two tons, would need more than 190,000 kilocalories per day; a 4.5-ton male would need 290,000 kilocalories per day.
Now I would not get excited about eating the same meal three times in one week. Maybe an otter to a KW is like chicken tender to us. More from the CAL paper:
...Adult sea otters weigh between 50 and 75 pounds, which represents, on average, 50,000 kilocalories. Depending on its size and the size of its prey, an adult killer whale could satisfy its appetite by gobbling up between 3 and 7 sea otters a day--or 1,095 to 2,555 otters per year. Williams estimated that the decline of sea otter numbers in the 1990s in the Aleutian Islands corresponded to the loss of approximately 10,000 adults per year. An average pod of killer whales (one adult male and four to five adult females) with a single-minded appetite could easily eliminate that many otters.
Thanks for bring those things up.