Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the formation of a bait ball represents a last-ditch effort for survival. But for many herring, this will be their final dance, swimming in tandem as the walls close in.

The instinct to group together stems from a fundamental survival premise: you are more likely to be eaten as a lone fish than you are in a crowd. The flaw in this strategy becomes apparent when baleen whales arrive on the scene. Lunge feeding from below, the giants ingest thousands of gallons of water, and with it, large quantities of fish.

If you’ve seen any footage of orcas around the world hunting their prey—be it flipping seals off blocks of ice, steamrolling great whites, or exhausting juvenile whales—you might expect them to employ similar brute-force tactics with the herring. But instead of swimming through the bait ball to consume as many fish as possible, the orcas more closely resemble an omakase chef in a narrow alley in Tokyo—deliberate and delicate. 

In a world of choice, the whales select a single herring, expertly filleting the fish for the fattiest sections and leaving the scraps. After the chaos of the hunt subsides, what remains resembles a pescatarian’s crime scene—stunned fish from the orcas’ tail slaps, some half-eaten and barely alive, others recently deceased, suspended in a galaxy of shimmering scales. All set to the high-pitched whistles of the hunters.

This is the plight of the herring—caught in the relentless dance of survival, but so often behind the bait ball.