Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The formation of a bait ball is a last-ditch effort for survival. But for many herring, this will be their final dance, swimming in tandem as the walls close in.

The instinct to group together stems from a fundamental survival premise: you're more likely to be eaten alone than in a crowd. The flaw in this strategy becomes apparent when baleen whales arrive. Lunging from below, the giants engulf thousands of gallons of water—and with it, massive quantities of fish.

If you’ve seen footage of orcas hunting—flipping seals off blocks of ice, steamrolling great whites, exhausting juvenile whales—you might expect them to use similar brute-force tactics with the herring.

But instead of crashing through the bait ball to devour as many fish as possible, these orcas resemble something closer to an omakase chef in a Tokyo alley: disciplined and deliberate.

In a world of choice, the whales single out a herring—expertly filleting it for the fattiest sections and leaving the rest.

After the chaos of the hunt subsides, what remains resembles a pescatarian’s crime scene—stunned fish from the slap of a tail, some half-eaten and barely alive, others recently deceased—all suspended in a galaxy of shimmering scales, set to the high-pitched whistles of the hunters.

This is the plight of the herring—caught in the relentless dance of survival, but so often behind the bait ball.