These Whales Can Eat Anyone Under the Table

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AAnd you thought teenagers ate a lot? Hawaii’s pilot whales could give a run for their money to food gobblers fueled by hormones that stimulate their growth.

The researchers calculated that a population of short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) off the coast of Hawaii eats nearly 2 million pounds of squid per year. They recently reported their findings in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Besides orcas, pilot whales are the largest dolphins. So it’s not entirely surprising that they need to eat so much to maintain their remarkable body weight, which can reach up to 6,600 pounds.

Pilot whales were already known to be extraordinary: They were the only members of the dolphin family to regularly dive more than 3,000 feet deep to hunt, where the pressure is more than a hundred times that at the surface. The dive requires a lot of energy, especially since short-finned pilot whales have been clocked at speeds of 20 miles per hour as they close the final gap with their prey. Many pilot whale populations migrate, but Hawaii’s short-finned pilot whales are homebodies, staying in the same area with their families all their lives, diving into the deep canyons off the big islands to feed.

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“If they consume more energy than they can find, they face an energy crisis that weakens their health, harms their ability to fight disease, and ultimately limits their ability to reproduce and restore the population,” says William Gough, study author and postdoctoral fellow at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, in a statement.

By tagging the short-finned pilot whales, Gough and his colleagues tracked the marine mammals’ movements and diving depths. Combined with body size data from aerial drones and diet information from the stomach contents of beached whales, the tracking gave an estimate of the required daily energy budget. An adult pilot whale must eat an average of 142 squid per day just to balance its energy balance. And for Hawaii’s population of about 8,000 short-finned pilot whales, that’s about 415 million squid per year.

You would think that all this gobbling up of squid would jeopardize the squid species around Hawaii, but according to the study authors, the squid are doing well, their populations both abundant and stable. That makes sense. Most squid species reproduce quickly, reaching sexual maturity and mating within their first year of life.

What’s wrong is the possibility of human activities disrupting the feast of these short-finned pilot whales. “Deep-diving species like pilot whales are particularly vulnerable to human-caused disturbances, such as ship noise or changes in ocean temperature, which can disrupt their foraging or increase their energy costs,” adds Gough.

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Main image: Vincent Kneefel / Ocean Image Bank

• Devin Reese

  Published on November 17, 2025

  Devin Reese is the editor-in-chief of Natural history and a science writer based in Alexandria, Virginia.