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A group of 13 orcas was stuck between sheets of ice off the coast of Hokkaido, Japan.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
“They seemed to have difficulty breathing,” said an employee of a local wildlife organization.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
Local officials said another group of orcas had died when a similar incident took place in 2005.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Over a dozen orcas<\/a> were stranded between ice sheets off the coast of Hokkaido, Japan.<\/p>\n A local wildlife organization, Wildlife Pro LLC, told Japanese broadcaster NHK<\/a> on Tuesday that it spotted the orcas while they were conducting marine research in the area.<\/p>\n “At about 10 o’clock in the morning, we found about 13 killer whales with their heads sticking out of a hole in the ice,” Seiichiro Tsuchiya, a Wildlife Pro employee, told NHK.<\/p>\n “They seemed to have difficulty breathing. There were about three or four baby orcas. It looked like they weren’t feeling well,” Tsuchiya continued.<\/p>\n Tsuchiya managed to capture footage of the orcas using a drone. The school of orcas could be seen bobbing up and down in Tsuchiya’s video.<\/p>\n Local officials, however, said that they weren’t able to rescue the orcas because the coast was covered with drift ice, per NHK.<\/p>\n “We have no choice but to wait for the drift ice to break so that the orcas can escape,” said one official.<\/p>\n It is unclear what has become of the pod.<\/p>\n This isn’t the first time orcas have been trapped in ice sheets near Hokkaido. Local officials told NHK that a group of orcas died after a similar incident in 2005.<\/p>\n Read the original article on Business Insider<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n