My absolute favorite Orca culture story (yes they have transmissible culture!) is the “salmon hat craze,” where the Orcas carry dead salmon around on their heads, apparently just for fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_hat
When you’re the apex predator of the world’s oceans you can get away with all sorts of silly nonsense!
And they got their name as a mistranslation into English - if I remember correctly they were originally named in Spanish as "killers of whales" or "whale killers", because they do that
killer whales also share food, carrying various food items in the mouths, aaaaaand they are trying to share, with us.....like , in the open ocean, wild whales, not some marine land stunt, nope, they are throwing food at US!, to see what WE do....awsome freeky
Would you mind rephrasing your comment, as currently I really don't understand what you're trying to say at all...
edit: I originally wrote out a long comment about exactly why your comment doesn't make sense to me, but after posting it I felt it was ridiculously long for its purpose, so if you want to waste time reading it you can find it here - https://pastebin.com/Y11P8ETs - but I think asking you to explain what you meant more clearly is enough for here :)
GP's comment reads reasonably clear to me: humans fearing orcas might eat them are about as rational as the cat visiting GP's garden, which also seems to be convinced GP wants to harm rather than feed it.
I think I didn't manage to see that meaning because the comment it was replying to had nothing to do with humans thinking orcas want to eat them, it was about orcas bringing food (like dead fish) to give to the humans. So more like a pet cat bringing a dead mouse to its owner than a cat in the garden fearing that the human wants to eat it?
At best, it is missing a verb. This is compounded by it's poor grammar (or poor style) and the fact that it is a non-sequitor to the comment it replied to. Someone can get reasonably lost reading it.
I’d be fine in the water near an orca in the wild as long as there aren’t any seals around. There is one alleged documented attack by non-captive orcas on humans and that guy claims he was near seals at the time.
I’d probably be nervous if I was sailing on the Atlantic Iberian coast and saw orcas, they’ve been ramming and pushing rudders and fucking around with sailboats, no thanks.
Humans certainly do kill cats both for food and "fun". And orcas will, from time to time, kill things that they don't eat. Even the exclusively fish eating orcas in the Pacific Northwest have been witnessed killing seals, even though they never eat seals.
Not being afraid of orcas is a show of lack of respect for them. They can weight up to 10,000 pounds, swim at bursts of 35 mph, swim at slower speeds for huge stretches, launch their bodies tens of feet out of the water, and kill anything from salmon and rays to great white sharks, humpback whales, and even blue whales. There is a lot of argument that they may be the greatest predator ever, on land or sea.
A domestic cat can easily wound a human and can usually get away. That is not true of a human in the water and an orca.
Yes, orcas are extremely, extremely intelligent, and there's zero reason for them to eat us for nutrition, as they are highly tuned eaters that maximize their calorie intake per effort. However, a human is completely within an orca's decision process as to whether the human lives or not.
I watched the video in the first link and it’s a pretty extreme stretch to say it was “offering food” to the human holding the camera. There was barely any indication it saw the person.
The second video looked significantly more promising, however the video cuts away before we can actually see what the whale does.
Unless I watch a third video and start seeing some very clear dog-playing-fetch-like behavior, I’m marking this one as highly implausible.
The BBC "Strong Message Here" podcast mentioned orcas removing the livers from sharks to eat and joked about "de-liver" - now every time I see "deliver" I think of liver removal...
If only they didn't live in the sea, and had developed frying pan technology, they could cook shark liver and kelp!
But to me, the interesting question is how the orcas worked out how the great whites had livers in the first place, and why they are the best bits (big bits) to eat? I hope the are not going to investigate mine, but they don't seem interested - yet. See two orcas not eating two teeny humans: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y8iipFTBanc
Fortunately, most orca families appear to have very specialized tastes in food, different from family to family, and quite complex strategies for acquiring the exact kind of food that they prefer.
As long as they can still obtain their chosen food, it seems that they do not have any incentives for experimenting with alternative foods, like teeny humans.
When whales, seals, penguins, sharks etc. will disappear, that might change.
Understand what you are saying - we are not fatty or flavoursome enough. But you have to ask - how do they know that?
I can understand why (for example) big cats are scared of guys carrying AK47s (or even a pointed stick - hello, Maasai), and will run away. But the orcas really can't experience that, and don't seem scared of us at all. Lots of examples of sperm whales attacking humans (see Moby Dick) but none of orcas doing it. I know there are those yacht-bothering things off Spain.
It is strange. Unless they are going to leave us (Douglas Adams) or are just waiting to be our inheritors, which is looking more and more likely.
There is a strong correlation between the behavior an animal will exhibit against a human and the behavior it will exhibit against other animals of its own species.
The animals which do not tolerate other animals of their own species and which will attack them and fight with them are also very likely to attack humans when they believe that humans have invaded their personal space. For example, an adult bear will never be truly friendly with a human, even with a human that has raised it as a cub, because adult bears are never friendly with other bears, but they attack any intruders. On the other hand, a wolf raised by a human can become tame and attached to the human, like a wild wolf would behave towards its real parents.
Similarly, male sperm whales fight viciously with any other male sperm whales and they also do not hesitate to attack any boats with humans that harass them.
AFAIK, intra-specific fighting is not frequent among orcas, but they are used to have good relations between them, even with some from different pods. This may explain their lack of aggressivity against humans, as long as they are not perceived as a possible prey.
I'm interested in those examples of sperm whales attacking humans. I believe those might have been defending and not actively attacking. It is said that Mocha Dick was docile until attacked. And I think that an animal that defends itself when attacked, is a different game.
I haven't heard of cases of people hunting down and fishing Orcas, like we did with Sperm Whales. Perhaps we would have had Orcas attack then?
> But to me, the interesting question is how the orcas worked out how the great whites had livers in the first place, and why they are the best bits (big bits) to eat?
The liver is like right there inside the shark. Open it up and have a look, and take a small bite of all the bits and figure out which tastes best. Might need to cooperate with a friend.
In principle, they could eat the whole shark and notice their favorite parts. That must have happened at least once. In practice, they probably learn it socially.
I've always found it strange how the study of human evolution focuses on the brain size as a proxy for the capacity for intelligence. Yet we have mammals walking and swimming around us with larger brains than us. Shouldn't the default assumption be that they too are highly intelligent, sentient beings? Human exceptionalism is a hell of a bias.
Isn't the idea of brain size being a useful proxy for intelligence quite outdated?
Partly because there are animals with larger brains which we now know are not very intelligent, with no assumptions needed, and partly because some of the most intelligent non-primate animals that we know of actually have very small brains - like crows and other birds in the corvid family.
While brain size is not a certain sign of intelligence, it is correlated with intelligence, especially when the comparison is done between more closely related animals, which have similar brain structures.
The largest brains belong to elephants and cetaceans, and both are among the most intelligent animals. However comparing their brain size to that of primates would not provide useful information, because for both elephants and cetaceans large parts of their brains are dedicated to the control of various functions of their large bodies that we do not consider as relevant for "intelligence", including things like trunk control and echolocation.
Interspecies grooming is a thing, and "grooming" or at least cleaning is a side benefit from 'parasites' that clean food from predators, including from between their teeth (eg: Docker fish cleaning shark teeth).
Unrelated but as an ESL, I always felt uncomfortable with the name "killer whales".
Not only "whales" is inappropriate according to their scientific classification, but also "killer" seems prejudicial since it inspire unwarranted fear.
> Orcas kill for sport. They push, drag, and spin around live prey, including sea turtles, seabirds, and sea lions. Some go so far as to risk beaching themselves in order to snag a baby seal—not to consume, but simply to torture it to death.
We might as well call them the assholes of the sea.
Wolves hunt to eat. Housecats hunt to eat but also for sport and fun and will very often not even consume their prey, as they are well fed by their owners. That's where the "cats of the sea" comment came from. Wolves are very risk-averse, and only hunt when they need to eat.
>Some go so far as to risk beaching themselves in order to snag a baby seal—not to consume, but simply to torture it to death.
Given how intelligent we believe them to be, it seems likely to me that mental stimulation (including perhaps "recreation") when not acquiring food is quite meaningful to them.
Some say they do it to teach their young how to hunt and stuff. That is educational. Might be true, since is a very social animal that live and hunt in packs of 3 generations.
As if I needed a reason to not read The Atlantic. What in the world is that article even about given the title and subtitle? It's behind a paywall. I can't imagine that the author has zero marine mammal experience, which seems to be a common theme amongst The Atlantic authors (knowing little about that which they write about).
That paragraph you quoted is pretty hyperbolic. Many orcas hunt live and dangerous animals for food. Their prey can seriously injure and even kill them. Because orcas are tight family units with several generations of females and males in the same pod who never leave the pod and because of their intelligence, orcas engage in teaching the younger orcas and each other. So this can very easily look like tortue when it's in fact how orcas train each other to work together. They will also share food readily between each other, so this is why it will also appear to be toying with food.
Yes, there is no doubt that orcas will also legimitaely play with food, but even then, it's a human judgement on a wild animal that can't go pick out meat in a box that comes from an animal raised and slaughtered in a cage.
The reason they're called killer whales is because sailors saw them kill whales, so they were called whale killers and then there was a switch of the two terms.
There is the alternative to call them orcas, which I prefer and which is also a much older name for them, being already used by Pliny the Elder, two millennia ago.
It would have been simpler if the word "whale" would have been applied only to baleen whales, but unfortunately in the Old English tradition the word "whale" was used for any big marine animal, e.g. not only for sperm whales, but even for walruses.
Its appropriate, inasmuch as they are an apex predator, and spend a majority of their lives hunting for food - as opposed to many other whales which filter-feed as a harvesting mechanism ..
Nice article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/30/orca-k... These supposedly serious cetaceans have been spotted massaging each other with kelp stalks. This is the sort of performative nonsense you’d expect from dolphins
My absolute favorite Orca culture story (yes they have transmissible culture!) is the “salmon hat craze,” where the Orcas carry dead salmon around on their heads, apparently just for fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_hat
When you’re the apex predator of the world’s oceans you can get away with all sorts of silly nonsense!
Killer Whales, aka Orcas, actually are dolphins!
And they got their name as a mistranslation into English - if I remember correctly they were originally named in Spanish as "killers of whales" or "whale killers", because they do that
All dolphins are whales. Not all whales are dolphins. It's a square / rectangle situation.
Orcas are indeed dolphins, and also whales.
> if I remember correctly they were originally named in Spanish as "killers of whales" or "whale killers", because they do that
Wiktionary supports that etymology, and it is generally a high-quality source for etymology, but it's troubling that this one isn't cited.
[dead]
killer whales also share food, carrying various food items in the mouths, aaaaaand they are trying to share, with us.....like , in the open ocean, wild whales, not some marine land stunt, nope, they are throwing food at US!, to see what WE do....awsome freeky
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/marine-animals...
https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/wild-orcas-offer-h...
Humans think they are whale food is just the same as the cat in our yard that sure I'm gonna make a goulash from him instead of serving him some.
Would you mind rephrasing your comment, as currently I really don't understand what you're trying to say at all...
edit: I originally wrote out a long comment about exactly why your comment doesn't make sense to me, but after posting it I felt it was ridiculously long for its purpose, so if you want to waste time reading it you can find it here - https://pastebin.com/Y11P8ETs - but I think asking you to explain what you meant more clearly is enough for here :)
GP's comment reads reasonably clear to me: humans fearing orcas might eat them are about as rational as the cat visiting GP's garden, which also seems to be convinced GP wants to harm rather than feed it.
Ah, OK that does now make sense to me, thanks.
I think I didn't manage to see that meaning because the comment it was replying to had nothing to do with humans thinking orcas want to eat them, it was about orcas bringing food (like dead fish) to give to the humans. So more like a pet cat bringing a dead mouse to its owner than a cat in the garden fearing that the human wants to eat it?
For what it's worth I was lost too. Even with the explanation it took a few minutes to fully parse.
At best, it is missing a verb. This is compounded by it's poor grammar (or poor style) and the fact that it is a non-sequitor to the comment it replied to. Someone can get reasonably lost reading it.
ETA: swores mentions this in their pastebin
People do, or have eaten cats, mainly when they’re starving. I’m not sure I’d want to be in the water with a starving Orca.
I’d be fine in the water near an orca in the wild as long as there aren’t any seals around. There is one alleged documented attack by non-captive orcas on humans and that guy claims he was near seals at the time.
I’d probably be nervous if I was sailing on the Atlantic Iberian coast and saw orcas, they’ve been ramming and pushing rudders and fucking around with sailboats, no thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_orca_attacks
Humans certainly do kill cats both for food and "fun". And orcas will, from time to time, kill things that they don't eat. Even the exclusively fish eating orcas in the Pacific Northwest have been witnessed killing seals, even though they never eat seals.
Not being afraid of orcas is a show of lack of respect for them. They can weight up to 10,000 pounds, swim at bursts of 35 mph, swim at slower speeds for huge stretches, launch their bodies tens of feet out of the water, and kill anything from salmon and rays to great white sharks, humpback whales, and even blue whales. There is a lot of argument that they may be the greatest predator ever, on land or sea.
A domestic cat can easily wound a human and can usually get away. That is not true of a human in the water and an orca.
Yes, orcas are extremely, extremely intelligent, and there's zero reason for them to eat us for nutrition, as they are highly tuned eaters that maximize their calorie intake per effort. However, a human is completely within an orca's decision process as to whether the human lives or not.
I watched the video in the first link and it’s a pretty extreme stretch to say it was “offering food” to the human holding the camera. There was barely any indication it saw the person.
The second video looked significantly more promising, however the video cuts away before we can actually see what the whale does.
Unless I watch a third video and start seeing some very clear dog-playing-fetch-like behavior, I’m marking this one as highly implausible.
not Orcas, but another apex predator offering food...
>> https://roaring.earth/feed-photographer/
Australian whalers "hired" orcas to help round up whales and paid in lips/whatever other parts orcas liked most.
https://killerwhalemuseum.com.au/old-tom/
More on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...
I'm not sure it is so much the humans hiring the whales as opposed of the whales hiring the humans :D
The BBC "Strong Message Here" podcast mentioned orcas removing the livers from sharks to eat and joked about "de-liver" - now every time I see "deliver" I think of liver removal...
If only they didn't live in the sea, and had developed frying pan technology, they could cook shark liver and kelp!
But to me, the interesting question is how the orcas worked out how the great whites had livers in the first place, and why they are the best bits (big bits) to eat? I hope the are not going to investigate mine, but they don't seem interested - yet. See two orcas not eating two teeny humans: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y8iipFTBanc
Fortunately, most orca families appear to have very specialized tastes in food, different from family to family, and quite complex strategies for acquiring the exact kind of food that they prefer.
As long as they can still obtain their chosen food, it seems that they do not have any incentives for experimenting with alternative foods, like teeny humans.
When whales, seals, penguins, sharks etc. will disappear, that might change.
Understand what you are saying - we are not fatty or flavoursome enough. But you have to ask - how do they know that?
I can understand why (for example) big cats are scared of guys carrying AK47s (or even a pointed stick - hello, Maasai), and will run away. But the orcas really can't experience that, and don't seem scared of us at all. Lots of examples of sperm whales attacking humans (see Moby Dick) but none of orcas doing it. I know there are those yacht-bothering things off Spain.
It is strange. Unless they are going to leave us (Douglas Adams) or are just waiting to be our inheritors, which is looking more and more likely.
There is a strong correlation between the behavior an animal will exhibit against a human and the behavior it will exhibit against other animals of its own species.
The animals which do not tolerate other animals of their own species and which will attack them and fight with them are also very likely to attack humans when they believe that humans have invaded their personal space. For example, an adult bear will never be truly friendly with a human, even with a human that has raised it as a cub, because adult bears are never friendly with other bears, but they attack any intruders. On the other hand, a wolf raised by a human can become tame and attached to the human, like a wild wolf would behave towards its real parents.
Similarly, male sperm whales fight viciously with any other male sperm whales and they also do not hesitate to attack any boats with humans that harass them.
AFAIK, intra-specific fighting is not frequent among orcas, but they are used to have good relations between them, even with some from different pods. This may explain their lack of aggressivity against humans, as long as they are not perceived as a possible prey.
I'm interested in those examples of sperm whales attacking humans. I believe those might have been defending and not actively attacking. It is said that Mocha Dick was docile until attacked. And I think that an animal that defends itself when attacked, is a different game. I haven't heard of cases of people hunting down and fishing Orcas, like we did with Sperm Whales. Perhaps we would have had Orcas attack then?
Its not that Orcas don't eat people, they don't leave witnesses. People disappear in the ocean all the time
> But to me, the interesting question is how the orcas worked out how the great whites had livers in the first place, and why they are the best bits (big bits) to eat?
The liver is like right there inside the shark. Open it up and have a look, and take a small bite of all the bits and figure out which tastes best. Might need to cooperate with a friend.
Echolocation enables cetaceans to see the internal 3D structure already before opening.
On a related note, they synthesize reflections in their communication.
In principle, they could eat the whole shark and notice their favorite parts. That must have happened at least once. In practice, they probably learn it socially.
I've always found it strange how the study of human evolution focuses on the brain size as a proxy for the capacity for intelligence. Yet we have mammals walking and swimming around us with larger brains than us. Shouldn't the default assumption be that they too are highly intelligent, sentient beings? Human exceptionalism is a hell of a bias.
Isn't the idea of brain size being a useful proxy for intelligence quite outdated?
Partly because there are animals with larger brains which we now know are not very intelligent, with no assumptions needed, and partly because some of the most intelligent non-primate animals that we know of actually have very small brains - like crows and other birds in the corvid family.
While brain size is not a certain sign of intelligence, it is correlated with intelligence, especially when the comparison is done between more closely related animals, which have similar brain structures.
The largest brains belong to elephants and cetaceans, and both are among the most intelligent animals. However comparing their brain size to that of primates would not provide useful information, because for both elephants and cetaceans large parts of their brains are dedicated to the control of various functions of their large bodies that we do not consider as relevant for "intelligence", including things like trunk control and echolocation.
It's as they say -- Don't judge a chip by its die size.
Title should be changed from "Killer whales" to "Orcas".
>Killer whales groom each other
If they don't do it, who will?
Other creatures in the sea, perhaps.
Interspecies grooming is a thing, and "grooming" or at least cleaning is a side benefit from 'parasites' that clean food from predators, including from between their teeth (eg: Docker fish cleaning shark teeth).
Unrelated but as an ESL, I always felt uncomfortable with the name "killer whales".
Not only "whales" is inappropriate according to their scientific classification, but also "killer" seems prejudicial since it inspire unwarranted fear.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/06/orca-kil...
> Orcas kill for sport. They push, drag, and spin around live prey, including sea turtles, seabirds, and sea lions. Some go so far as to risk beaching themselves in order to snag a baby seal—not to consume, but simply to torture it to death.
We might as well call them the assholes of the sea.
Cats of the sea.
Is them attacking luxury yachts the equivalent of my cat knocking down glasses of water?
more like wolves of the sea, since they hunt in packs and often attack prey larger than them.
Wolves hunt to eat. Housecats hunt to eat but also for sport and fun and will very often not even consume their prey, as they are well fed by their owners. That's where the "cats of the sea" comment came from. Wolves are very risk-averse, and only hunt when they need to eat.
>Some go so far as to risk beaching themselves in order to snag a baby seal—not to consume, but simply to torture it to death.
This is very much housecat behavior.
Given how intelligent we believe them to be, it seems likely to me that mental stimulation (including perhaps "recreation") when not acquiring food is quite meaningful to them.
Some say they do it to teach their young how to hunt and stuff. That is educational. Might be true, since is a very social animal that live and hunt in packs of 3 generations.
Play is education and skill improval in general
As if I needed a reason to not read The Atlantic. What in the world is that article even about given the title and subtitle? It's behind a paywall. I can't imagine that the author has zero marine mammal experience, which seems to be a common theme amongst The Atlantic authors (knowing little about that which they write about).
That paragraph you quoted is pretty hyperbolic. Many orcas hunt live and dangerous animals for food. Their prey can seriously injure and even kill them. Because orcas are tight family units with several generations of females and males in the same pod who never leave the pod and because of their intelligence, orcas engage in teaching the younger orcas and each other. So this can very easily look like tortue when it's in fact how orcas train each other to work together. They will also share food readily between each other, so this is why it will also appear to be toying with food.
Yes, there is no doubt that orcas will also legimitaely play with food, but even then, it's a human judgement on a wild animal that can't go pick out meat in a box that comes from an animal raised and slaughtered in a cage.
The reason they're called killer whales is because sailors saw them kill whales, so they were called whale killers and then there was a switch of the two terms.
Especially when the alternative is so easy to spell and pronounce...
There is the alternative to call them orcas, which I prefer and which is also a much older name for them, being already used by Pliny the Elder, two millennia ago.
It would have been simpler if the word "whale" would have been applied only to baleen whales, but unfortunately in the Old English tradition the word "whale" was used for any big marine animal, e.g. not only for sperm whales, but even for walruses.
Its appropriate, inasmuch as they are an apex predator, and spend a majority of their lives hunting for food - as opposed to many other whales which filter-feed as a harvesting mechanism ..
Murder Dolphins!
> "killer" seems prejudicial since it inspire unwarranted fear.
They are apex predators. I don't think it's prejudicial to call an apex predators "killer." It's accurate.
Do you still think it's "prejudicial" after seeing how they actually behave? - https://youtube.com/watch?v=35yly16M8p4
Beyond that, it's not inaccurate to call them whales. They belong to the same family as dolphins, which are toothed whales.
Other languages cannot be subjected to logic.
[dead]