Wild orcas playing with a human swimmer have been caught on a beautiful drone video

Most of us will never be able to do this. You’re swimming in the ocean, minding your own business, when all of a sudden, a family of sleek marine mammals appears and swims along with you.

That’s what happened to two swimmers off the coast of New Zealand in recent weeks, when families of playing orcas joined them in the water (Orcinus orca).

Photographer Dylan Brayshaw took a video on December 4 at Hahei Beach that is now getting a lot of attention. He says that he saw a swimmer swimming toward a group of three orcas, who then started to swim around her.

She got out of the water to calm down, and when she came back, Brayshaw started taking pictures. The video is amazing. It shows a small group of orcas, including two young ones, swimming around a swimmer as she swims through the ocean.

Rowan Virbickas, a spearfisherman, had a similar experience on November 26. While he was looking for sea urchins, he ran into another family of orcas—three adults and a baby—who also swam in circles around him.

He was able to record the incredible event on his GoPro.

Because of the name “killer whale” and the number of times orcas have killed their trainers in captivity at places like SeaWorld, the marine mammals (a species of oceanic dolphin) have a bad reputation for being violent.

But in the wild, orcas have never been known to kill a human, even though they can kill animals that are much bigger and stronger than humans. The very few attacks that have happened could have been because an orca thought a person was a seal.

People have different ideas about whether orcas that are kept in captivity attack people on purpose or not, but there is evidence that keeping them in captivity hurts their mental health as well as their physical health.

In fact, wild orcas have worked with humans, like the ones at Twofold Bay on the southeast coast of Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They helped whalers catch whales in exchange for tasty treats.

We know that orcas are very smart because different pods speak different dialects of their language and they may even have developed a culture with complex behaviors that vary by region and pod. Look also this video:

And when you see them swimming free in the ocean, doesn’t their beauty just make you happy?