Whale of a Karate Chop

NorthernFocus

We had occassion to observe a pod of orcas for a couple of hours as they cruised around an enclosed bay. The pod was split up into three groups with two or three individuals in each group. They appeared to be hunting salmon. There was one pair crusing together that appeared to be a female and a juvenile male. A couple of dozen times over the course of time that we were watching, this pair made violent splashes which none of the other groups did. I finally captured one of the episodes. It happened so fast I didn't even see the details of the motion through the viewfinder. It wasn't until I downloaded the images that we could tell that what we were seeing was a violent, karate chop style tail slap. In retrospect and after doing a little reading, it appears the juvenile male must have been making "unwelcome advances" and the female wash thrashing him with her tail. The following image is a composite of three consecutive frames taken at 6fps.

Nikon D200 ,Nikkor 80-400mm VR
1/400s f/8.0 at 240.0mm iso500
PP:levels, 70% crop, USM, combined the three frames