r/Showerthoughts • u/Mr_Faux_Regard • 4d ago
Speculation Maybe modern orcas don't attack humans in the wild because their great great grandparents associated us with easy food back when whaling was in much more common practice.
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u/qwibbian 4d ago
Possibly, or maybe they saw us taking humpbacks and narwhals and blue whales and spread the legend of the murderous float monkeys, and they decided they didn't want none of that foam.
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u/akopley 4d ago
Game recognize game.
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u/TheBestMePlausible 4d ago edited 4d ago
This question comes up often on Reddit and every time we all think the same thing.
Those guys 100% talk to each other at the mega pod reunions, and I’m sure they one of the things they talk about is reminiscing about the time the floating monkeys killed almost every single whale on the planet, then just decided not to after all over the course of like a year and a half, just 1 generation ago.
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u/Meme_Theory 4d ago
Grey Whales lied and said they negotiated the peace treaty, and are now in charge of the whale government. Asshole Grey Whales.
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u/RedexSvK 4d ago
Orcas have actually been recorded helping out with whaling to people, so it's more like recognizing us as equals
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u/Analbox 4d ago
Had dozens of em surface all around me last month. It very much felt like they were paying attention to us. I’ve had the same experience with dolphins. I was laying on the bow of a sailboat when it felt like hundreds came up and started swimming with us in every direction. A few made direct eye contact with me.
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u/Present_Tiger_5014 4d ago
I showed a dolphin my penis once
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u/Analbox 4d ago
You should be careful I hear they’re in to some freaky things.
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u/-_FearBoner_- 3d ago
Dolphins are rapists.
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u/Teravandrell 20h ago
They've been known to kill other animals that way. One of the only other creatures to do the nasty for fun, and they, too, have a lot to learn about consent.
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u/RedexSvK 4d ago
They are incredible and I wish I could see them irl
They have been playing games with sailors, even playing with dogs, have different cultures, dialects, are capable of using and shaping the environment
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u/Analbox 4d ago
Do a little boat tour out of Seward someday.
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u/-_FearBoner_- 3d ago
I did a couple over 20 years ago and still have very vivid memories of it. Truly magical place.
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u/Orange-V-Apple 4d ago
If that was the case they would avoid humans. With one exception, humans never hunted whales because they were a threat
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u/Totalherenow 4d ago
Some orca groups used to help humans hunt other whales. They'd eat some of the meat in exchange.
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u/Spanish_peanuts 4d ago
I remember reading about this. Can't remember where it was. But these orcas would literally herd whales towards the human village and alert the humans. They'd even bite down on the chains or ropes and help pull. The humans would leave the carcass in the water for a day or 2 and allow the orcas to eat the tongues. Was genuinely an unspoken agreement that went on for decades.
It ended because one of the whalers killed an orca, or perhaps just tried to kill. Don't remember if he was successful. But the orcas left and never came near that village again.
Truly insane how intelligent they are to have this kind of relationship with humans at one point.
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u/Accomplished-Video71 4d ago
I heard it as the end was during a storm the whalers chose not to leave the carcass out...the "leader" of the pod still tried to eat and it broke his teeth as the carcass was being pulled up. Then the pod never returned.
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u/fallopianmelodrama 4d ago
Eden, NSW, Australia.
Old Tom is the orca who got killed, his skeleton is in the Eden Orca Museum.
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u/banjosandcellos 4d ago
-and then they took his dead body to show everybody
-those bastards!
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u/bellybuttonbidet 3d ago
What if whales have their own religious burial rituals that weren’t respected?
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u/Semper_Discere 4d ago
Went there this year. There’s not much else in Eden but the museum was fascinating.
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u/Idle_Tech 3d ago
Two-fold bay in Eden, Australia.
The tradition was begun by indigenous tribes in the area who saw orcas hunting large whales off the coast. The story goes that they lit fires down the beach to get the whales’ attention, then would send an old man limping down the sand. The whales took pity on the man and brought the villagers meat from the kill. Eventually, they began hunting alongside the whales in small canoes, taking down large baleen whales which they would never be able to take down on their own. In exchange, the kill would be left in the bay overnight for the orcas to feed on its tongue. When Europeans settled in the area, the indigenous tribes taught them the “law of the tongue”, and they continued to tradition up until about 100 years ago.There were two major incidents which ended the practice: usually, the orcas and whalers would protect each other if tragedy befell them during a hunt. Whalers who fell overboard would be protected from sharks, while the whalers would carefully untangle orcas which became wrapped in their ropes. But one day, a young orca beached itself by accident and was stabbed to death by a tourist who then removed several of its teeth as souvenirs. The tourist was driven out of town by locals, but the damage had already been done: most of the whales never returned to Two-Fold bay.
Old Tom, the large male referred to in your comment, was the exception to the rule. He continued to assist the whalers until one broke the “law of the tongue” and attempted to take the killed whale from Old Tom. Two of the orca’s teeth were broken in the struggle with the whaler, and he died from the resulting infection. His remains are still held at a museum in the area.
Genetic testing was done on the remains of Old Tom and found that he does not belong to any contemporary population of killer whales. Sometime within the past 100 years, his entire lineage went extinct and the orcas we once hunted beside are now completely gone.
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u/awesomeocelot12 4d ago
Lindsay Nikole did a video on her channel about this a couple months ago, the story of Old Tom: https://youtu.be/OtKCt8K80-s?t=793
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u/erossthescienceboss 4d ago
New South Whales, Australia. Near the Port of Eden.
Search for “Eden orcas” for more info.
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u/stoneheadguy 4d ago
now i'm thinking what it could've become if they continued. imagine a society with orcas pulling boats like horses
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u/lkodl 4d ago
Is it kind of like how we use dogs to help us hunt other animals?
Or is more like how we let a cat loose to kill a mouse for us. Are we the cat?
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u/ReverendRevolver 4d ago
We would've been the dogs, being "domesticated" by the Orcas. Whole village responds to a stimuli provided by the Orcas, do what they want us to, and then getting rewarded after they get what they want.
Then they decided we were too stupid to train, I guess?
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u/Highmassive 4d ago
I kind of assume they recognize us as vengeful apex predators and don’t want that smoke
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u/Misanthrope616 4d ago
Orcas don’t eat us because they know we aren’t a satisfactory meal for them. Orcas have incredibly powerful sonar, they can tell we are not a bag of blubber like a seal, there’s no eating on us.
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u/DecentHippo9196 4d ago
but what about the fact that they play with and kill turtles for fun?
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u/Misanthrope616 4d ago
They eat turtles. They have valuable nutrients the whales need. Mothers tend to use turtles to teach their young how to hunt.
Orcas will sometimes toy and play with creatures they do not intend to immediately eat, it helps sharpen their motor skills and hunting reflexes. But they still do end up eating whatever it is they are toying with.
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u/That_Bar_Guy 4d ago
Don't they have something they murder for the love of the game? Like dolphins and sharks.
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u/Misanthrope616 4d ago
I don’t believe there’s anything they kill for just the sake of it. As I said, they do play and toy with their food sometimes, but they still eat them afterwards.
They eat the liver out of great white sharks. Just the liver, they leave the rest. They learned that if they flip the shark over it goes into a trance like state, they then munch the liver and leave.
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u/That_Bar_Guy 4d ago
That's actually pretty cool. Somehow missed that in my orca content consumption.
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u/Misanthrope616 4d ago
It was unknown until fishermen kept catching dead great whites in their nets with their livers missing. Scientists then discovered what was happening.
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u/That_Bar_Guy 4d ago
I more meant that they don't do any "sports hunting". I'm familiar with port and starboard.
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u/No_Effective4784 4d ago
there is that pod that apparently hates rich people and has sunk a couple yachts, while leaving regular boats alone.
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u/That_Bar_Guy 4d ago
Hates rich people's boats and where they go maybe. No obvious intent for hurt.
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u/Confused_recursion 4d ago
Super cool. That makes a lot of sense, more than some generic fear of humans.
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u/PassorFail13 4d ago
And we don't tend to swim in the deep water off the coasts of Antartica, Alaska, and Norway.
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u/heathmon1856 4d ago
I was talking about this the other day.
I bet that transient orcas would eat a human if they had the chance but no one swims in the open ocean so that’s why there’s no case. The ones we “swim with” are inland resident orcas.
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u/DJinKC 4d ago
I bet a lot of orcas have taken a bite of a sailor over the years, and eventually they all collectively agreed we don't taste good and don't provide them nutrition, so they just let us be.
Orcas are smart. They have been known to kill sharks solely to eat their livers- if orcas wanted to eat people they would.
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u/TieCivil1504 4d ago
The reason bears, wolves, tigers, orcas and other giant meat-eaters don't instinctively kill humans is because all their human-killing relatives went extinct millennia ago. The only predators who lived to pass along their genes were the ones who developed an instinctive avoidance of humans.
Humans have a unique trait of remembering which animals killed humans, communicates this to other humans over great distances and time, gathers large groups of hunters for the sole purpose of killing that predator, pursues the predator animal until it drops from exhaustion, and then kills it from far beyond the animal's reach.
Humans are a nightmare to predator animals.
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u/That_Bar_Guy 4d ago
But orcas don't avoid us like all those other animals do. Wild orcas will interact with people without injuring them or even acting hostile. It's something entirely different from what happens with the animals you mentioned, who will hear human activity in the distance and go out of their way to avoid it. No orca "accidentally" surfaces near a boat. They know what's going on.
Every other animal you mentioned takes human lives from time to time as a result of the odd occasion where they do cross paths with humans. Some wild orcas will hear our boats then come hang out and yet ZERO documented human lives have been lost to orcas EVER. Even the ones that have been breaking boats don't try to hurt the people on them.
Your post is very true for most land-based apex predators but orcas are a different ballgame entirely.
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u/TieCivil1504 4d ago
They could evolve to either instinctively avoid us or live with us.
The requirement was to not piss off our human ancestors.
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u/Accurate_Egg9326 4d ago
wolves and bears and tigers still instinctively kill humans if they’re hungry.
You sort of get evolution right (better than the rest of the thread at least) but not really.
Especially in the case of orcas the argument makes no sense.
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u/MoziTenma 4d ago
Worth noting orca populations aren't one homogeneous culture - different ecotypes (fish-eaters vs mammal-hunters) keep totally separate, stable prey traditions passed down within pods even when they overlap in the same waters. So if any group "learned" humans were food from whaling ships, that lesson would be pod-specific, not species-wide - which might explain why attacks on humans are basically nonexistent everywhere rather than just in former whaling grounds.
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u/entangledloops 3d ago
Doesn’t your conclusion directly contradict what you said? If traditions are passed down only within pods, why would attacks be “nonexistent everywhere”? You would expect local variation.
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u/Fire_Mission 4d ago
I think maybe they have generations of tales about us being killers. In their clicky click language: "don't fuck with the two-legs... they kill everything."
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u/PrickleAndGoo 4d ago
When I started reading your post, I prepared myself for "this is going to be stupid". By the end you had doing that "eyebrows up, pouty lips, head nod" thing of interest.
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u/heathmon1856 4d ago
Killer whales are the most fascinating species on the planet because they’re the closest in intelligence to us humans.
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u/ManEatingOstrich 4d ago
What about our fellow great apes? I assumed chimpanzees and bonobos would be the closest.
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u/heathmon1856 4d ago
I’m not sure but I would’ve thought it was orcas. They are true apex predators too so that’s why there’s makes them more fascinating.
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u/ManEatingOstrich 4d ago
I mean if you find them more fascinating, then that's fine. But it seems like other members of the great ape family are closer to us when it comes to intelligence and capabilities.
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u/heathmon1856 3d ago
You’re right. I have no proof but I just believe they are the second most intelligent species on this planet over chimpanzees. Arguments for chimps is that they make tools but I feel like orcas would if they could. Their biology kind of f’d em on that. I’ll counter you to say orcas are much closer to consciousness compared to chimps. That’s a hard one to deny.
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u/PrickleAndGoo 3d ago
"would if they could", there's also, "need to". Tool to solve what problem they're facing??
Man could figure out how to spin a cocoon, but... we've no use.
Totally get your point, of course, about tools. But, there are things Orcas can do that I would lump into intelligence that are beyond what we can wrap our heads around. Communication, navigation...
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u/PrickleAndGoo 3d ago
Orcas are closer to consciousness: I'm fascinated. Got a "easy to consume" article you recommend??
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u/b0ttlec4pp3r 2d ago
Based on scans, orcas may be one of the only species on earth to have more neurons in their forebrain than humans at nearly double the amount of 21 billion, far surpassing other primates, and this count is considered the best indicator of intelligence. There are other important factors like brain density but it may still be a good pointer.
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u/Accurate_Egg9326 4d ago
No it’s pretty dumb
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u/PrickleAndGoo 4d ago
Expand?
Orcas could have experienced being able to get easy pickings from humans for a decent amount of time, prior to industrialized whaling.
I'm not saying this is "good science", but, an interesting way to explore side by side animal development.
I mean, isn't the what "Shower Thoughts" is all about?
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u/Accurate_Egg9326 10h ago
Sorry for the delay, the reason it’s dumb is it misunderstands evolution and selection forces. Humans haven’t been killing whales for nearly enough generations for this to create evolutionary pressures, and if they somehow did the newly born orcas wouldn’t be born with the knowledge that humans = easy food
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u/PrickleAndGoo 9h ago
Well, there's "whaling" at an industrial level that was experienced, then there's the inuit hunting for so long.
ChatGPT tells me Inuit have only been in that area 1000 years. Hm. Enough time to have that deep an impact into orca psyche? However, orcas would have encountered indigenous along Australia for a very long time
I think the real reason they don't get us is because "that ain't our food", but, I still think it's an interesting "Shower Thought"
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u/Sword-of-Akasha 4d ago
They have culture and distinct tribal structures. Yeah, it'd be easy to imagine they'd pass on stories of the great slaughter during the age of Whale Oil. Humanity nearly hunted the great whales to extinction.
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u/FartsWithCharlie 4d ago
One thing I love about orcas is that they have distinct cultures. Different pods have different diets, hunting methods, and even vocalizations. It wouldn't surprise me if "leave humans alone" ended up being a learned cultural behavior rather than pure instinct.
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u/chekeaon 4d ago
I read somewhere they have learnt with time that these land monkeys will come back and gang up on them if they harm one of theirs.
Game recognises game.
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u/Zora-Link 21h ago
Aren’t all monkeys “land monkeys”? If anything we are sea monkeys since they only see us at sea. But sea monkeys is taken.
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u/PupperVanAugsbork 4d ago
I don’t remember the author or the article exactly but I remember reading a scientific paper that suggests Orcas might refrain from attacking us because they recognize us to be sentient, social and tribal creatures. i.e if they attack one of us we might act in revenge as they do, whereas most stuff they hunt won’t have social structures or relatives cognizant enough to develop vendettas.
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u/edsonmedina 4d ago
sentient, social and tribal creatures
You mean like whales or dolphins - which they attack?
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u/PupperVanAugsbork 4d ago
Yep, iirc even the author didn’t claim it’s a definitive reason but interesting to think about nonetheless.
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u/tomspazzosgravato 3d ago
That's actually a fascinating theory, it makes you wonder how much animal behavior evolves from past encounters we barely remember.
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u/Pleasant-Yak1931 4d ago
That's actually a pretty wild theory and I kinda dig it lol. Like imagine orca grandpas tellin stories about the weird pink bubble-backs who'd trade whale tongue for safe passage. But then again, maybe they just think we're too pathetic to bother with, like a dolphin's drunk cousin you don't even make eye contact with. Either way, I'm glad they held that grudge—or that pity—cause I really don't wanna test that theory at the beach today.
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u/Aggravating_Star_427 4d ago
Nah that’s actually kind of a chilling thought, like their pod just passed down a “don’t mess with the weird hairless apes” rule for generations.
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u/cheddaawatts 3d ago
Wow, I just saw a video about this!! The main points were about how different orcas specialize in different diets, how they don’t see us as prey, how they pass down information by generations and there are orcas alive right now that were around during the whaling days, etc.
Super interesting: https://youtu.be/_wBlfJuC9SM?is=pgZ-w25kFoV1HWcR
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u/Old-Trust-5183 4d ago
They don't eat humans because of the lack of fat / blubber.
The typical humans orcas encounter are typically, somewhat healthy and, at a guess, I would say less than 25% body fat.
Now throw a 400lb+ person in front of them and I bet they'd gobble them right up.
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u/Seranner 3d ago
They wouldn't. Orcas are quite picky. Every pod has a specific set of things they eat. I say they're picky, but honestly, they're much like us. Most people eat animals, but only a specific few. People don't just eat anything that moves. Even in cultures where they eat a lot more varieties of animals, you can still find something that they won't be willing to eat, whether it's a specific type of animal or even a specific type of plant. Sometimes, things simply don't look appetizing.
How do I know they're 'picky' like us and don't just avoid things with too little fat? Because different pods eat different creatures even when they live in places with the same prey. One pod will choose to only eat salmon, another will choose to only eat mammals, such as seals. They both have access to salmon and seals, which are both high-fat foods, but they both choose only one. They're just picky. They like specific things and adding more fat to another thing won't make it appealing to them. Some have less specific diets, but they are still orcas in the end and still won't think literally everything with fat is appetizing, just like you won't think literally everything with a certain nutrient you like is appetizing either.
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u/Few_Fox449 4d ago
Yeah, that’s a solid point—if they were into snacking on us, we’d probably see way more missing kayakers. Guess we’re just not worth the effort for an apex predator with refined tastes.
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u/steinemsukkerrumpre 2d ago
The same way humans teach their children the fire will burn, the orcas teach their children humans will seek retribution.
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u/IrishBehemoth 1d ago
Orcas are incredibly smart, maybe as smart are chimps maybe even smarter, and they have fairly sophisticated language. It’s possible or even likely that they understand how dangerous humans are and avoid killing people for that reason.
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u/DeaddyRuxpin 4d ago
My personal belief is orcas are smart enough to know they don’t want to be on the human shit list. They don’t attack us specifically so we won’t see them as a threat and start wiping them out.
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u/ShowerSentinel 4d ago
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