Captain posts TikTok of herself coaxing a sea lion off boat after it jumped on to escape whales

A TikTok video captures the moment a sea captain was forced to send a sea lion to its death at the fins of hungry orcas after the animal scrambled onto her boat to avoid the pod near Vancouver Island in Canada‘s Pacific coast. 

‘An orca looks right up at me,’ @nutabull captioned the video. ‘Where’s my lunch, b****? Give it up now!’ 

Taken down since it was posted on Sunday, hundreds of commenters on Twitter have put themselves in the woman’s shoes, discussing how they would have reacted to the trying situation. 

‘What the f***,’ the woman said, panicked, as the equally-panicked sea mammal clambered up onto the her vessel . ‘No, no, no, no – do you see what just came up on my boat?’

The animal looks back at her beseechingly as the woman frantically pans her camera at at least three orca whales circling.

As she tells the animal over and over that it has ‘gotta go’ and ‘get in the water’ it looks challengingly back at her, as if imploring her to hit the gas and get out of there. 

 ‘Oh my God, I don’t know what to do,’ the woman says, her voice wavering. 

Some users wondered why the woman didn’t simply speed away, whisking herself and the doomed sea lion to safety. But things aren’t that simple – in many coves and harbors, it is illegal to turn on engines within a certain distance of endangered animals like orcas. 

‘I can’t,’ the woman said of the belated suggestion in a TikTok comment on the now-deleted video. ‘Can you imagine starting the boat and taking off and the propeller hits one of the 250 only orcas alive – to the 2 million sea lions?’ 

The woman audibly gasps and gulps as the orcas weave around and under the boat – and with good reason. 

Although an orca has never killed a human in recorded history, they have been seen working together to tip huge ice floes to catch escaping prey. Last year, the New York Post reported, a group of orcas systematically rammed the rudders of small boats to tip them over off the coast of Spain, terrorizing 33 seafarers.

Unimaginably strong, orcas often use their tails to punt seals up to 80 feet in the air, according to Newsweek, and they can launch their bodies – weighing between 3,000 and 12,000 pounds – up to 15 feet in the air. 

‘Listen, I know wild orcas don’t generally go for humans, but if I was in that situation I would panic,’ wrote @mitkitty1 of the hair-raising scenario. ‘Kinda hard to stay calm and think about orca facts when there’s three giant hungry apex predators around you.’

Even Great White Sharks are terrified of orcas – if one senses that a killer whale has travelled through its regular hunting territory, it will abandon the area for up to a year, according to Smithsonian Magazine.  

‘I know you’re supper, honey,’ she said to the wide-eyed seal as the pair watched the menacing whales. ‘This is how the world works.’

After nearly four minutes of pleading with the ill-fated seal, it slides off the boat and she motors away, looking back at the spot where it dove into the water. 

Many users swore that they would have acted more nobly under the same circumstances, acting to save the poor animal. 

‘Someone like me would have fought the orcas to save the sea lion, but [I get] we’re all different,’ wrote @Br3ADB0Y. 

 Other users had a less altruistic take on the situation:

‘I’m sorry, but I’m not gonna disrupt the food chain before the food chain disrupts me,’ wrote @miyahbortion, attaching a shrugging picture of Will Smith in the ‘Fresh Prince of Bel Air’ with the caption ‘it is what it is.’

‘I don’t think it’s so much about WANTING to send it to its death so much as it is not wanting to JOIN IT on the orcas menu,’ wrote @Henryjeromekni2. 

‘Honestly she didn’t have to do a thing,’ argued one user. ‘The seal was safe and those whales wouldn’t have capsized her boat. If she fired up her engine the whales would’ve left.’

‘That’s not how orcas roll man,’ replied @TriggerStorm. ‘We don’t know how hungry they were, they will definitely capsize your boat if they want to. They’re actually starting to do it more now and it’s terrifying.

 Others made light of the life-and-death situation, using gifs, making jokes and  dubbing audio over the user’s original video. 

‘[What do you mean] I gotta go?’ one user captured a picture of the wide-eyed sea lion. ‘B**** start the boat.’ 

‘Ma’am, this ain’t got nothing to do with you,’ the user wrote under a still of a looming whale from the clip. ‘Give us the sea lion and you’ll be on your way.’