A photographer on Wednesday captured rare images showing a large mobula ray leaping near a crowded boat off San Diego County – roughly 900 miles north of its typical range.
But there’s also a humorous aspect to Lory Barra’s images, in that everyone on the boat is looking elsewhere and seemingly missed out on an extraordinary sighting.
Barra stated via Instagram: "While having a special and rare encounter with ETP Killer Whales from Mexico, I captured this cheeky Mobula Ray doing a FINtastic flip that no one in the Pelican noticed!"
Barra was aboard the Shearwater with Newport Coastal Adventures in search of Eastern Tropical Pacific killer whales, or orcas. The boat shown in her images is the Pelican, also from Newport Coastal Adventures.
ETP orcas
are sporadic visitors from the south and have been spotted several times over the past few weeks.
While some reports tied their recent visits to an intensifying Super El Niño, that’s not clear. But the exceedingly rare presence of mobula rays off San Diego, along with other species from tropical waters, is associated with the warm-water phenomenon.
Orca researcher Alisa Schulman-Janiger told me that the search for ETP killer whales began Wednesday after a 7 a.m. sighting by fishermen off Dana Point in southern Orange County.
The orcas, a family pod of as many as 13 individuals, were headed south and the Newport Coastal Adventures boats found them hunting dolphins off Oceanside. (The accompanying post is via Capt. Delaney Trowbridge.)
At some point during the encounter, the mobula ray leaped and Barra was quick with her camera.
"I saw a couple of them on Monday while looking at killer whales, but I wasn’t fast enough to snap the photo,” she said. "On Wednesday, that was the only mobula that I had seen and he only jumped once. He was pretty big compared to a lot of the ones I’ve seen in Mexico before.”
Mobula rays, which boast wingspans up to 17 feet, are encountered seasonally in large schools off southern Baja California, notably Cabo San Lucas and in the Sea of Cortez.
They can attain speeds of 13 mph and can leap six feet above the surface. They’re also incredible divers, able to descend more than 2,000 feet.
It was not clear if the mobula ray photographed by Barra was trying to evade the ETP orcas.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: As boaters look for orcas near San Diego, giant ray leaps out of water
