The seal feels perfectly safe lying on the Antarctic ice even if it is surrounded by a pod of killer whales.
But within minutes it has been knocked into the water in a clever team tactic before being killed.
These astonishing pictures show how the sea predators work together – and the technique provides meals for killer whales three out of every four times they use it, according to scientists.
Prey: Two killer whales circle the seal in the Antarctic before adopting a team technique to knock it off the ice
Team tactic: Three killer whales create a huge wave as they head for the seal on the ice floe
Research has also found that the mammals – around 26ft in length and weighing more than six tonnes – carefully butcher the prey underwater, co-operating as they skin and dissect the seals.
Dr Robert Pitman, a marine scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in California, took the stunning images of the pod going in for the kill.
He said: ‘The killer whales were very good at knowing in advance if they were going to be able to wash a seal off a floe and they were always successful in getting the seal into the water.
‘A couple of times the seal was washed off but managed to escape in the confusion, but not very often. From killer whale studies elsewhere we expected this kind of social interaction but it was the canniness of their hunting tactics that blew us away.’
Killer wave: The whales have created a wall of water to hit the ice and knock the seal off
Hanging on: The seal appears helpless to stop the wave washing it off the ice and into the water
Dr Pitman and his colleague Dr John Durban helped a BBC film crew capture their behaviour for the TV documentary series Frozen Planet, to be shown later this month.
They spent weeks tracking and recording the hunting behaviour in the pack ice off the coast of the Antarctica Peninsula.
In one attack, the whales charged in formation towards the ice from as far away as 150 feet, creating a wave in front of their bodies and a deep trough above their tails. A second larger wave formed above their pumping tails.
When they reached the ice, they dived under it, kicking their tails in a powerful stroke to create a large wave that washed over the ice and knocked the seal into the water where they could grab it and drown it.
Game over: The seal desperately tries to get back onto the ice, but the killer whales are ready to pounce
The whales prefer weddell seals, which can be up to 11 feet long,rather than the more aggressive crabeater and leopard seals.
Dr Pitman told the Sunday Telegraph that the whales deal with seals who try to hide among the ice after being knocked into the sea by creating shock waves with their tails to knock them out into the open water.
He said: ‘The whales also blew streams of bubbles under the seals apparently trying to get them to bolt into open water where they wouldn’t have a chance against the waiting killer whales.’
STUNNING PICTURES CAPTURED BY THE FROZEN PLANET TEAM
Got you: An orca takes a seal and drags it into the water to drown it after a three hour team hunt in which the entire pod co-operated in order to make giant waves that washed the seal from its initial ice floe
Bear necessities: A male polar bear showing battle scars and the mate he defended from 10 suitors. Their courtship was filmed over a fortnight, capturing extraordinary intimate and tender moments
Whale of a surprise: A cameraman holding a camera on a pole in the icy Antarctic water, gets a shock when an killer whale mother and calf explode out of the water in front of his face
Target: A sea lion chases a Gentoo penguin onto land – both are like fish out of water and the sea lion struggles to make a kill
Smoking: An early-morning view of Mt Erebus, Antarctica’s only continuously active volcano. The aerial crew waited eight weeks to get a clear view of the top of the volcano which was extremely treacherous to fly around
Blue lagoon: Aerial shot of a sapphire blue meltwater lake on Greenland which formed in a matter of days, but several weeks later drained into the ice sheet in a matter of hours
Desolate: A nunatak, an exposed rocky peak, pokes through the ice sheet in Antarctica where 90 per cent of the world’s ice is found and is nearly three miles thick in places
P-p-p-perishing: King penguins silhouetted at dawn on the island of South Georgia in the Falklands. They are the second largest species of penguin, weighing up to 35lbs
Killer pack: Twenty-five timberwolves led by the alpha female, travel single-file through the deep snow to save energy as they track bison on the Arctic circle in northern Canada in temperatures of -40c
In for the kill: Timberwolves forced the bison herd to stampede and picked off a yearling which fell behind after another bison ran headlong into it
Snow scene: Finland’s frozen taiga forest shot in a magical light.The Taiga is the greatest forest on Earth, containing at least a third of all the world’s trees
Go with the floe: A giant iceberg hundreds of metres across which would dwarf most of the world’s buildings. It collapsed from Store Glacier on the west coast of Greenland
Flakey: A close-up of a snowflake which was filmed with unique macro technology developed especially for the shot
Surf dude: A Gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua papua) rides the wave. The penguins are masterful surfers and were filmed at high speed as they came ashore to feed their young
Bird bath: An aerial shot of a humpback whale filmed at the largest gathering of shearwaters on the planet – 18 million off the coast of Alaska in the Aleutians
Swoop: The reclusive Great Grey owl is one of the largest owls in the world with a wingspan of between four to five feet. It it is often referred to as the Great Grey Ghost or Phantom of the North
Krill bill: A humpback whale dives for krill fish amidst thousands of short-tailed shearwaters in the Bering Sea off Alaska while on the seabed there are giant sponges up to 2 metres high as much as a thousand years old
Sea world: A cameraman bolts an underwater tripod to the ice ceiling to get extraordinarily stable, shots of amazing ice formations or ice chandeliers , which were inhabited by millions of tiny ice fish whose bodies were full of anti-freeze
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