Moshe Ruach and his team from the Blue Wave Tashoot sailing club set sail, as usual, last Tuesday at 6 a.m. from the coast of Hezbollah, Israel, little imagining the surprise that awaited them.
After about 40 minutes at sea, they noticed fins sticking out of the water in the distance. At first, they thought they were common dolphins, but their behavior was different. They moved calmly and didn't jump like we usually see.
For about an hour, between six and ten of these cetaceans swam alongside the boat in a relatively shallow area. They quickly reported the sighting on the SeaWatch app, managed by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), which then notified the organization Delphis, dedicated to marine mammal conservation.
What they found, they later learned, was a pod of false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens). This is a very rare sighting, first recorded in 2025, which has sparked the interest of scientists and conservationists due to the scarcity of these cetaceans in shallow waters of the eastern Mediterranean.
Dr. Aviad Scheinin, head of the Marine Predators Laboratory at the University of Haifa, explained that the false killer whale is actually a type of dolphin that typically lives in deep waters, and until 2020, all sightings in the eastern Mediterranean occurred in the open sea, between Israel and Cyprus.
However, since the COVID-19 pandemic, sporadic encounters have begun to be reported near the coast, possibly due to foraging.