So what can we conclude? Super smart, organized and no love for other mammals. I am amazed they only seem to go after humans in the sea world type scenario (film: Blackfish, shows the madness it induces in such animals). I don’t know of any attacks on surfers. Which seems odd. They would be so scary to swim near.
Orcas are certainly the bullies of the ocean, but they seem to exhibit complex behavior when it comes to their relationship with other mammals. For example, after capturing, "playing" with, and eating baby seals, an orca carries one seal back to shore and sets it free. It's odd behavior.
> In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, orcas near Eden, Australia, would drive humpback whales into an area known as Twofold Bay in exchange for their favorite pieces of meat—the tongue and the lips. This working relationship where the killer whales worked as whale killers for more than a hundred years was referred to by local fishermen as “the law of the tongue.”
"Bullying" is a simple phenomenon explained by physical size and capacity in relation to everyone else. If you have the size, you bully. Very few exceptions.
Pretty much all aquatic species larger than the orca are relatively peaceful and do not harass other species (eg, baleen whales, sperm whales, whale sharks, basking sharks). It's not merely a size thing. Orcas, in fact, tend to harass these larger species.
Humpback whales will even go so far as to protect other mammals from orcas.
> For six and a half hours, the humpbacks slashed at the killer whales with their flippers and tails. And despite thick swarms of krill spotted nearby—a favorite food for humpbacks—the giants did not abandon their vigil.
> It’s not clear why the humpbacks would risk injury and waste so much energy protecting an entirely different species. What is clear is that this was not an isolated incident. In the last 62 years, there have been 115 interactions recorded between humpback whales and killer whales, according to a study published in July in the journal Marine Mammal Science.
"Why Humpback Whales Protect Other Animals From Killer Whales"
Between species? (Some) kids may have occasionally blown up toads, if movies from the 80s are to be believed. But hurting any mammal or bird without a good reason earns you a trip to the psychologist (and police station if old enough). With animals, there obviously is a lot aggression. But I don't think "bullying" is necessarily the right term. It seems more like either predator/pray behaviour or fights to establish social hierarchy.
The latter obviously comes close to one definition of bullying. But bullying as you explain it, i. e. "because I can", seems rare. Which is also what evolution would suggest, since getting into useless fights is bound be net-negative: even if chances of winning are overwhelming, there is always some risk. Plus it's a waste of energy.
Meta: I can't bear watching this video, I find it infuriating. It's a mix of many shots, with no temporal continuity. I don't think there is a continuous shot of more than 3 seconds. The music is annoying (wouldn't natural noise be much more impressive) and over the top. The attack scene is not even clear because of all this. And most of the time is spent watching someone boasting that her "scientific" film is marvelous.
I don't have TV at home, and I rarely watch youtube and modern videos, so I suppose I'm just not used to way TV is nowadays. Even the BBC. I hope it doesn't help inducing ADHD.
The reason why it's cut like that it's because it's a Behind The Scenes from the shooting of BBC's Earth. Normally you'd watch it after watching a specific episode (or even later) and you're not interested in particular content of the shot, but about the making of the shot. Hence the interview, rapid cuts and so on. If you see the full BBC Earth, the scene is a lot better and makes more sense.
Thanks for providing the actual explanation. There are (currently) four other comments with useless everything-used-to-be-better-cynicism, which make me pine for the web of yore, when more than 1 in 4 comments brought expertise and not faux-nostalgia.
That's the trend of these type of shows. While these types of shows can/could be considered educational content, they try to over dramatize them to make them "entertaining". They try to build up some drama/tension even if it is obviously forced. Then intercut with the limited video footage you have even reusing the same footage. There's a fine line to keep educational content from boring your viewers to tears and making it feel like sitting in a secondary school class, but the producers have not gotten it right yet.
That seems to be the trend these days. Videos are cut for emotional effect mainly. A lot of videos about race cars are like that. Quick cut here, quick cut there, cool sound, it sort of implies that something cool is happening but you never really see it. Same with the latest Marvel superhero movies. I watched Avengers and I couldn't even tell what's going on in the fight scenes.
I have to completely agree. Horrible video. I found a much better one that is very neat to watch the orcas do a coordinated attack. Check this one out: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AwbNRNCxhFg
If you lived on a planet where there were lots of dumb animals you could eat, and also one not-very-meaty alien species that was 10x more intelligent than you and had machines and weapons, would you try to eat the superintelligent ones? I think they are just too smart to eat humans.
We can't taste pretty good either. We're all muscle and bones. Not enough fat, especially on the kind of people who might be in their feeding zones (say, surfers).
i waste too much time on YouTube. But there is another video of a snorkel diver lady who swears a whale (forget which species) protected her from a shark. It would be nice to think there is some mammal bro behaviour (flipper <-> Hand fist bump!) but evolution has altered our morphology so much I doubt they see us as distant relatives. It took humans ages to see the evolutionary connection from us to everything else. I know a lot of animal hunt mainly on smell. Maybe we smell related. Or taste bad. Or maybe they just find us sufficiently amusing not to merc us.
I haven’t been lucky enough to encounter them but there are entire bays in Hawaii where only whale sharks will regularly go. Tiger and bull sharks will stay well away most of the time because of the dolphins and dolphins love people.
I like to think that they think we’re all just loveable fools à la Douglas Adams.
Aren't seals mammals? And in captivity, killer whales have a killed a few humans, dunno the total count. So I guess they just don't find humans that appetizing in the wild, or just haven't had the chance to try them out. I'm not sure how common it's for humans to swim in the same waters as killer whales. And isn't it quite rare for sharks to attack humans too?
I wonder if it's a matter of looking at humans and going, "Wow, that weird little critter has such a hard time moving around." and some protective instinct for injured or sick pod members kicking in.
I would assume it overlaps with whatever instinct or learned behavior inspires them to kill sharks - if you're not going to kill a shark directly, why not deprive it of a meal?
In fact many of the animals that could or have actively preyed on humans are mammals: large felines, and to a lesser extent, canines. Reptiles probably take second place though thanks to crocs.
From the article it appears orcas are aggressive towards sharks in the area since they are competitors. Likely more territorial than “let me protect this weird water monkey.”
You might be onto something here. Dolphins look cute, and orca's don't look like the killers they really are. Sharks on the other hand look scary. So it works the other way around.
But they do eat seals, which are probably closer related to them than us?
Humans really tend to anthropomorphize animals but it's about 99% more likely that the orca didn't want the great white in its hunting grounds or near its pod's younglings.
There have been a couple of reported attacks by early Antarctic explorers. It’s not clear if the orcas were provoked/mistook the men and dogs for their usual prey.
At the end of that clip, she gets so excited about seeing something that "no one had seen before", yet at the beginning, she talks about them hoping to see this because of reports of it happening. Huh? Contradict yourself much? I hate these overly dramatic reality type documentaries. Otherwise, some great footage, and could have been so much better without the overly produced interview.
Pedantic readings are not very interesting. "No one" can also mean "not a significant amount of people." Recording and distributing it is the antidote.
Entirely informal, but I went through reports of 100 years of killer whale/human interactions in the news in British Columbia/Canada (home of 3 different varieties of killer whales) - and there's three cases of humans attacked, and all cases were provoked.
It’s possible they recognize that (a) we are small and not worth the trouble and (b) they recognize other higher brain mammal life. But they hunt dolphins so....
Maybe it’s just that we don’t live in their environment.
Wow interesting. There seems to be more and more evidence that orcas, dolphins, and octopuses are very intelligent.
I wonder if one of them would achieve human-like intelligence if they evolved for a billion more years. I would bet on it.
And then they would probably multiply without control, and kill off all their competitors.
On land, humans have done that. Although elephants are very intelligent, we're the smarter than them and outnumber them and all other animals by a large margin. We live on nearly every part of the earth.
It would be interesting/weird if the sea filled up with one large, intelligent animal that lived everywhere.
Yes I definitely see that point of view. Being smart is a special case of being adaptable, but many other organisms thrive by being well adapted in their niche.
On the other hand, Sapiens has a good quote about there being 2 (at least ?) orders of magnitude more domesticated dogs than wolves in the world. Ditto for pigs and wild hogs, or cattle and comparable wild herbivores.
It has many other pretty shocking statistics about large cats, elephants, etc. The world today is simply much more suited to a dog's way of being than a wolves'.
To put it more starkly, wolves will likely be extinct long before dogs are, because of their different relationship to humans.
But of course ants and other species don't compete for the same resources as humans, and are complementary many ways.
We are smarter, whatever that means. But not by that much. Our main differantor is technology. If you went back in time and looked at a feckless human tribe hunting it would not be that different than orcas, wolves or any other social mammal predator.
With hands to build tools that build machines and books to communicate. Basically dialing advantages of hunting in packs up in orders of magnitude over time.
Similarly, "the computer is a bicycle for the mind."
Fire is important but, borrowing from Jared Diamond, I think agriculture/domestication is the defining technology that enables population density and growth. A steady food supply enables density, which leads to exchange of and competition in ideas. e.g. compare a city with 100,000 citizens vs. a hunter-gatherer society.
Fire is related to agriculture but maybe not essential. It could be some other kind of chemical reaction that occurs outside the body.
It's hard to imagine how descendants of orcas could create agriculture in the ocean, but not impossible. I mean humans have domesticated fish, shrimp, mollusks, etc. for farming. And probably some marine plants.
It does seem like shallow water is probably the best bet, but maybe that's my lack of imagination.
I agree agriculture is possible in some form. That's why I think the real blocker is combustion. Is there any other kind of chemical reaction that can generate energy that can be harnessed and that works underwater?
Most of shark attacks on surfers are mistakes, so perhaps orcas are just smarter and see better, and can make a distinction between seals and humans on boards? But then again I've heard about orcas sinking sailing boats and trying to attack polar explorers by breaking the ice below them, so it's not like they're completely uninterested in attacking humans. It probably depends how much contact with humans they have. Being predators, it's only logical that they will eat anything they can catch when the hunger strikes...
Super smart, organized and no love for other mammals.
Depends on the population: The 'resident' (in contrast to 'transient') orcas in the Pacific Northwest do not eat mammals, even though it would be to their benefit as salmon is getting sparse...
It’s a myth that they never attack humans in the wild. As with most shark attacks it seems to be a case of mistaken identity. Since orcas are significantly more intelligent though they usually retreat before any real harm is done.
The Blue Planet making of video showed that the Orcas filmed trying to knock the seals off the ice flow seemingly attempted the same "trick" on the humans on the small boat filming them. While it is remarkable that we don't seem to have evidence of orcas attacking humans, this making of video seemed to suggest to me that they were at least thinking about it.
No evidence of wild orca attacking humans. There are plenty of examples in captivity.
But if something the size of a large white, or any orca, wants to actually eat you, there wont be much of a body left to find. You could be swimming in a group and just vanish. I would not get too comfortable around anything with teeth that size.
orcas sometime hunt animals that are on the beach. Orcas don’t see humans as prey. In Norway you can dive with wild once in the fjords and there are no recorded attacks in the last 200 years.
I agree. Animals may or may not have our emotional depth but it seems very illogical to assume they don't have emotions like love, especially animals similar to us like other mammals. They clearly have evolutionary value for providing social structure and nurturing virtually helpless babies and toddlers. Many will risk their lives without hesitation against ridiculous odds to save other pack members.
So what can we conclude? Super smart, organized and no love for other mammals. I am amazed they only seem to go after humans in the sea world type scenario (film: Blackfish, shows the madness it induces in such animals). I don’t know of any attacks on surfers. Which seems odd. They would be so scary to swim near.