In an unusual sight captured on video, an orca was recently spotted off the coast in the Gulf of Maine this winter. Boothbay region fisherman Steve Wood filmed the whale while ground fishing 40 miles offshore. Scientists said the sight was rare but not impossible. 

"It's not super unusual for an orca off of Maine, and I think a lot of people don't really think we have orcas in this area. And generally speaking, we don't. But we know there's definitely like groups of orcas that live in the North Atlantic Ocean," said Amy Warren, scientific program officer at New England Aquarium.  

Warren said scientists think orcas are generally found farther north in Canada, but they aren't as well understood or studied as their Pacific counterparts.    

 "We don't know what the numbers actually are. I know, like in the Pacific, they are very highly endangered," Warren said. "(It) could be surmised that they're in a similar position, but it's just it's much more unclear in the North Atlantic."   

Bigelow Laboratory scientist Nick Record said orca sightings are periodic in the Gulf of Maine. He said aggregate surveys show around 100 orca observations in the gulf over the past two decades.   

Several social media commentors said they recognized the whale as Old Thom, a marine celebrity of sorts. Old Thom is a well-known North Atlantic Orca sighted once or twice a year, often alone or with dolphins. Warren said the last sighting she knew of was in August 2025. She couldn't confirm if this was him in the video because his signature dorsal fin nick mark wasn't clear in the cell-phone footage. However, she said the chances are good.   

"Any time we actually can ID an orca in this general area, it tends to be Old Thom, so we're kind of getting to the point where we start to assume it's probably him, she said.   

However, Warren confirmed the orca in the video is male, because of it dorsal fin size and that it was alone. She said males tend to leave the pod and wander off on their own, perhaps searching for mating partners outside the pod's gene pool or just looking for food.    

"I think food is always a factor at some level," Warren said. "It's hard to know exactly the motivations of it. We assume they're kind of eating a lot along the way, and we know that the Gulf of Maine is a great place to find, like it's very productive in terms of food and fish, and things like that."  

Warren has heard of Old Thom sightings off Maine or in the Bay of Fundy in the winter and, in the summer, around Cape Cod or Georges Bank, off Massachusetts. However, a few sightings of a single whale aren't enough to understand the population or their migration habits. 

"It's kind of funny, because that's actually backwards from a lot of other whale species that do migrate," she said. "Normally, they're going south in the winter, north in the summer. So, I think that's another part where it's hard to make these generalizations off of one whale."