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TIL orcas sometimes share their prey with humans.
(www.thecanadianpressnews.ca)
cough, cough Eat the rich.
did they leave leftovers?
In New South Wales Australia, back in the commercial whaling days, a pod of Orca used to help the whalers round up the big whale species the whalers were after so they could be easily harpooned, once they had the whale back to land and cut up they would gift the tongue to the Orcas as payment.
I read this before somewhere and I still can't shake the feeling the orcas are actually baiting the humans like that. Orcas are very intelligent and use cool tricks when hunting, like generating waves to flush prey from the ice into the water. Baiting humans to come close or become more trustworthy seems like a next step to me.
Or it is more likely similar to how people will leave out food for animals they just want to observe as a way to draw them closer. Like bird feeders.
Orcas just don't have any interest in attacking humans in the wild. Even the ones sinking ships don't touch the humans, they mostly go for the rudder to immobilize it
They're the mammal with the wrinkliest brain. They have distinct languages and cultures, and a long history of cooperation with humans
My guess is they have an oral tradition about being hunted endlessly by humans no matter where they go, and killed along with their pod. Because that's exactly what we would've done up until very recently
Or they just recognize us as intelligent and have morals
Or they just recognize us as intelligent and have morals
I'm really starting to doubt our intelligence, but I could imagine them having higher moral standards than us as a species.
This feels more like cat behavior. They want to cut a deal. Orcas for whatever reason, really have zero interest in predation of humans. I’m curious to know if any local fisherman in the area know these whales. The researches should talk to them. I bet this is a multigenerational tradition for this group. They want to trade for something locals give them, or they just think humans are helpless and that boat has been hanging around doing a pretty crappy job at hunting. No fish, no seals, no sharks— they just sit there.
There are videos of orcas using fish to bait seagulls and other marine birds and then eating them. They are quite smart.
So they have a taste for poultry is what you're saying.
I have seen videos of Leopard Seals doing the same with fresh penguin kills and their seemingly disgusted looks when the human diver does not accept the gift
My head cannon is that orcas have a robust language and culture, and they have a religion which contains tenates about not harming humans which they developed during the Holocene after generations of mass retaliatory killing by humans.
You're describing how pretty much every animal evolved alongside us.
Most animals leave us alone unless they feel we're attacking them (which doesn't always equal to what we consider attacking) or when really, really hungry.
All the animals that didn't leave us alone died, so that's why that characteristics was bred into almost everything around us.
One of the famous exceptions is polar bears who had virtually no exposure to humans historically, so they'll happily kill you for fun.
I wonder if this applies to ocean meagafauna. Were humans numerous enough along coastal areas over evolutionarily significant timespans?
I think most animals are absolutely terrified of anything human
They see us as pups who don't know how to hunt.
Unfortunately they're terrible cooks.
If whales had thumbs (to enable tool building), I have no doubt they’d have become dominant like humans did on land. Though I suppose it would’ve been difficult to discover fire underwater.
You know I’ve had thoughts about exactly this problem; what if a species evolved extreme intelligence but had no access to dry land to develop technologies.
Incoming speculation:
Tap for spoiler
I envisioned it would be something like octopus, because they absolutely fit the bill with tentacles workable as manipulation appendages, and would absolutely have developed technologies if they lived more than a couple years, and raised their young to pass on information.
I suspect they would be capable of observing stuff around them and understanding how it works at least as well as early agrarian societies, since they have proven able to figure out things like opening jar lids (even from the inside!) and escaping their tanks and stuff. So we’d see them creating nets to ranch fish, and I suspect their technology, continuing down that path, would probably be temperature and bioengineering-based, since electricity would be an epic challenge.
But you can create biological solutions to like.. most stuff, if that’s all you’ve got to work with (in fact there’s a whole field called biomimicry that focuses on finding solutions to modern problems in already-existing forms through nature, and the solutions are almost always simple and effective) Selective breeding wouldn’t be fast or anything but it would do. At least until they sort out other stuff. Ocean life already has a huge huge range of features, it would only be a matter of choosing the right starting creature.
As for heat tech, there are natural heat sources like vents, but there are also sources like radiation/radioactive materials. The water does a good job shielding the radioactivity, so they could probably use the heat generated from either source to do basic mechanical work using something like steam engines. Could also be used to transform materials (cooking food, melting soft metals, etc.)
Octopuses are quite intelligent but I don’t think they have the lifespan to become a dominant society.
So many creatures are almost there but missing just one or two things.
Even Homo sapiens, the overwhelmingly dominant species on this planet, having all the things ready, didn’t do a lot of progress for tens of thousands of years.
A technological civilization looks like a chain reaction that can’t quite start without a initial spark. I think anthropologists are still trying to find out what that spark was.
Yeah, like I said they’d need to live more than a couple years and have some way to pass on learned information, but the body plan and intelligence adaptability still meet the mark to be the base of the thought experiment. Mostly because I am not creative enough to come up with another ideal.
Yeah it kind of freaks me out a mollusk got that smart. Their development of intelligence is so independent from most other species on earth, it’s just bizarre. It gives human but in another animal phylum.
Cooking over/near a thermal vent FTW
... even though we don't deserve it.
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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