A pod of at least nine killer whales, with some other individuals joining in, have had a busy week of feeding in Monterey Bay, all as tourists excitedly watched. On Monday we saw this video of the pod feeding on the carcasses of two dead gray whales, and now as SFGate reports via the Monterey Bay Whale Watch Facebook page, the pod has hunted and killed four separate times in seven days, including a gray whale calf that they killed in front of a boat of whale watchers on Wednesday.

Nancy Black, a marine biologist with Monterey Bay Whale Watch, tells SFGate that this is "unprecedented" and "This has never happened in my thirty years," saying that she's never seen such a spate of binge feeding as this.

The whale watching group explains that migrating gray whales are a "very important food source for these killer whale families," and it appears that the group is both ravenous and teaching some younger killer whales how to hunt in the process.

The hunt on Wednesday, Black said, only took about twenty minutes, possibly because the calf and its mother were skinnier and weaker than most. The hunts can last up to several hours as the mother gray whale "desperately tries to protect her calf, using her tail to fight back and rolling over belly-up with the calf on top."

Also giving whale watchers a thrill are about 60 to 70 humpback whales that are also in the area. And the humpbacks get in on the hunts as well, though not to eat. "Humpbacks like to interfere with the killer whales for some strange reason," Black tells SFGate. "They seem to want to protect the prey."

You can sort of see this happening in the video above.