Great White Sharks Are Terrified of Orcas
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
> In 1997, an Orca in the Farallon Islands was seen holding a White Shark upside down for 15 minutes. Whether intentional or not, the Orca likely caused the shark to enter tonic immobility. Defenceless, the shark, suffocated. This also happened again in 2000.
> In New Zealand, Orcas also seem to use tonic immobility to hunt stingrays. Before attacking the orcas will turn themselves upside down. Then, holding the stingray in their mouth, they'll quickly right themselves. Flipping their prey upside down.
IANAO, but it works on herons and pelicans.
All apex predator younglings are easy game until they are adults.
Also existence itself is best described, in a broad and literary sense, as Lovecraftian. Don’t think about anything too hard. Especially your own perception of reality, or place in reality. Or... reality. Just don’t think, maybe. That’s safest.
But yes I am absolutely capable of ignoring that and going "wow aren't those flowers pretty" and do it all the time.
Yes, there is plenty of horror to go around, but we humans sometims like to fixate on it, amplify and imagine it somehow absolute, fetishize it. Animals don't live in constant horror, it's pretty obvious (and surely their cortisol levels are not constantly through the roof), they just don't fixate on all that stuff. One day, they'll probably experience agony and death, but so what, it's all part of life. That doesn't make them less conscious really, but in this case just more sane than a lot of us humans.
Abstract:
> Predatory behavior and top-down effects in marine ecosystems are well-described, however, intraguild interactions among co-occurring marine top predators remain less understood, but can have far reaching ecological implications. Killer whales and white sharks are prominent upper trophic level predators with highly-overlapping niches, yet their ecological interactions and subsequent effects have remained obscure. Using long-term electronic tagging and survey data we reveal rare and cryptic interactions between these predators at a shared foraging site, Southeast Farallon Island (SEFI). In multiple instances, brief visits from killer whales displaced white sharks from SEFI, disrupting shark feeding behavior for extended periods at this aggregation site. As a result, annual predations of pinnipeds by white sharks at SEFI were negatively correlated with close encounters with killer whales. Tagged white sharks relocated to other aggregation sites, creating detectable increases in white shark density at Ano Nuevo Island. This work highlights the importance of risk effects and intraguild relationships among top ocean predators and the value of long-term data sets revealing these consequential, albeit infrequent, ecological interactions.
"Great White Sharks are terrified of Orcas" suggests a higher level of intelligence than "Great White Sharks evolved to fear anything that can kill a Great White Shark".
It seems that the study is less concerned with that mechanism and more with the fact that this kind of displacement leads to White Sharks occupying sub-optimal hunting grounds while Orcas get to go wherever they want.
This is one of my favorite discoveries: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2012/08/08/121154710...
But white sharks fight each other, kill each other and even eat each other on occasion. We know that white sharks fetuses cannibalize each other in the womb. How could they do that if white shark blood scares them off? Also, is there really a difference in smell between white sharks and other sharks, seals, etc?
This is such an easy thing to test. Has anyone taken white shark blood and tested it on white sharks ( captive or wild )? Also, does this only work on white sharks? Do tiger sharks, nurse sharks and other sharks fear blood of their own species?
Finally, white sharks are scavengers as well as hunters ( like most predators ). As far as I know, every scavenger will cannibalize when given the chance. Are white sharks the exception?
Also, most animals flee when they see, smell or hear a predator. So I think it's most likely that white sharks flee when they sense a potential predator.
If truly shark blood scares off sharks, then coast guards should dump some shark blood near beaches where sharks frequent.
I spearfish, and have spent a lot of time in the water with sharks. There nature is very much like that of dogs. If you show fear, try to flee and basically make yourself look like prey they will get attracted. If you stand your ground, give them a nudge to the face when they get to close. They see you as a competing apex predator that can hurt them, sharks are adverse to fighting for their meal. It is why injured fish is such and attraction to them. I have been in the water with them, just cruising around not paying any attention to anything, someone shoots a fish and all hell breaks loose if you don;t get the fish up fast enough. Once you are in possession of the fish they act as if another shark got it and go back to just cruising around. If they get to your fish before you get it up, they will clean it off the spear in seconds flat.
I would imagine that sharks compete for the same food source so they run them off to ensure food availability. Dolphins will also not try to steal your catch, at least not in my experience.
My expereince with dolphins is limited though, I have only been in a pod while spearfishing twice and both times where due to the fact that there was a bait ball, so there where a lot of predators competing for prey fish. Including Sailfish and Marlin, which the dolphins seem to use as the billfish bat thru the ball stun the fish and then the pod will grab some of the stunned fish.
My personal experience is that dolphins know what spearguns are, and don't like them, they generally don't approach if you are spearfishing. The release of a spearshaft and the band pop is a very distinct vibration, many apex fish including large grouper and sharks are keyed into it, in some areas. I remember one time, I pulled the trigger and had two blacktips on me within a split second. The fish was dead on impact so the only vibration was the gun going off. Anyways I would guess that dolphins key into this as well and avoid it.
That being said, when I am in the water without a gun they always approach check me out, push their babies towards me to check me out. I think it's akin to us going to sea world, it really is like hey kids look it's a human check it out, get a good look you don't get to see these too often.
One time my dog jumped in and the babies would swim about a foot under it, to make it go crazy barking. I think they loved the sound as when she would stop they would circle back and get her going again. (Side note: I think dolphins are into ASMR if you are ever in the water with them make sounds they love it). It was the one time I thought to myself, I hope dolphins don't eat dogs because she is a beagle, so small enough. Anyways, they don't, and I am glad they don't hunt humans, if they did we would not be able to enter the water. A human hunting dolphin would be a fearsome predator and absolutely terrifying in a serial killer kind of way. They are really smart and you get a feel for how smart they are when you have natural encounters with them.
https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/01/63/62/17251480/15/rawImage....
Did you confuse thousands of kgs and lbs? Because 2.3 tons is the unverified all-time record (with verified being 1.9), while 6t is a large orca and the all-time records was apparently around 10t.
And it seems Orca's may have figured out a sharks big weakness... tonic immobility - https://www.sharktrust.org/tonic-immobility
(Legitimately curious. Rereading before posting makes me realize that I sound like an anti-evolution troll XD )
Also see this informative graphic: https://www.juneauwhalewatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/...
https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-very-primitive-brain-like-in...
I thought air (23%) also has more oxygen than water (1%), so Orcas have a big advantage in endurance here, but googling it water is much more dense than air and has more oxygen counted as mass. My guess is, that oxygen is more accessible with breathing air in lungs than with having gills?
Oxygen "wants to" dissolve in oxygen-depleted water, especially ionic/salty water, specifically blood.
It's much less eager to permeate from one liquid into another liquid of comparable salinity.
Sharks have an additional disadvantage over bony fishes, in that they must be moving for their gills to work at all.
The name for this is -"obligate ram ventilators" which is a fantastic phrase.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/are-whales-sm...
So before you jump to conclusions: there is obviously research on the matter; e.g. you might start here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-m...
But while the effects in humans may be small, the difference between 35g and 7kg is... huge, so even if the effect might be imperceptible and in any case likely irrelevant between healthy humans, that's another story at that kind of ratio. Not to mention that I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and conjecture that metabolic differences may even increase that difference (i.e. the orca's brain may be running hotter, too).
Maybe a pig-like-opossum?
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.
There are lots of recorded cases of them helping humans though
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_S...
I like to think that they think we’re all just loveable fools à la Douglas Adams.
Or maybe we're just ugly-cute to them.
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?
That could be because surfers tend to be in much shallower water.
So if most surfers surf in waves up to about 6ft, the water depth below a surfer is only about 8 feet.
If the waves get bigger than that, it quickly thins out the crowds. On ten foot days, typically only a few people will be out.
See: https://magicseaweed.com/help/near-shore-effects/breaking-wa...
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.
Besides, I wouldn't waste your time nitpicking what someone blurts out in a moment of excitement.
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.
Stay away from modern Hollywood movies! This sort of frenetic cutting is endemic these days. I miss Stanley Kubrick!
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWsN63PRCW8
There are also cases of orcas saving humans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1ZkkHesyjg
> 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.”
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/blog/killer-whale-avoids-eat...
There’s no point in letting a potential future meal drown if you’re not hungry at the moment.
Never in wild, only in captivity (not surprising though give amount abuse they get in captivity).
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"
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/08/humpback-wha...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/mms.12343?c...
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.
As a test I would suggest looking at solitary, herbivore animals with few natural competitors. Here's a capybara: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b1822fb258d0d6a4ce01db...
Maybe it’s just that we don’t live in their environment.
It's not just humans that they don't attack. Orcas have cultural food preferences and tend to hunt only the prey that they grew up eating.
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.
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.
We are out-numbered by many orders of magnitude by a number of different animals:
Which life form dominates Earth? http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150211-whats-the-most-domin...
This strange, glowing fish is more abundant than rats, chickens, and humans combined https://www.businessinsider.com/bristlemouth-fish-is-the-mos...
Along With Humans, Who Else Is In The 7 Billion Club? https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/11/03/141946751...
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.
Similarly, "the computer is a bicycle for the mind."
For reference, a billion years ago, there were no animals or plants yet.
Given that, maybe there are a lot of species that really weren't too far off from human level intellligence, but we just got there first?
I don't think the one reported bite counts as an attack.
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...
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.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28218-zoologger-the-o...
I'm not sure how deep the analogy goes but a falconer told me that they "hunt like wolves".
If you're interested in the intelligence, empathy, and minds of animals, I can heartily recommend this book. The last third or so of the book covered Orcas (and some whales and dolphins) and it was pretty amazing. I particularly liked that he covered some of the stories that are not quite scientific in nature, while calling them out as such. The book will definitely leave you with the lingering feeling that minds and awareness are not quite as simple and clear cut as we might believe them to be.
Peter Watts & Laurie Channer "Bulk Food": http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/WattsChanner_Bulk_Food.pd...
Robert H. Miller, Kayaking the Inside Passage.
They use group tactics.
There's no doubt that a great white is an impressive beast, but there are even more fearsome animals out there. Orcas for one. Sperm whales for another. Something bigger than giant squid that gets into fights with sperm whales and leaves horrific marks on their bodies. To the real heavyweight champions of the sea, a great white would be a snack.
https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/19biolum/logs/ju...
I have been SCUBA and free diving many times and seen sharks, and it is a thrill, but no fear.
As I have written on HN before, once when I was 10 miles offshore in a small Columbia 22 sailboat and Orca (killer whale) jumped four times high out of the water landing right next to my boat, violently rocking it. Yes, I felt fear.
I hate this kind of statement so much. Megalodon would be hunting in warm shallow water areas close to the coast. And they are defiantly not 'hidden somewhere in the deep'.
If Megalodon existed, whales could not have grown as large as they did.
> "adult megalodon were not abundant in shallow water environments, and mostly inhabited offshore areas.[1]"
They're also thought to have died out 3.6 million years ago. There's no suggestion that a descendant is still alive, but that's plenty of time for such a lineage to evolve to specialize in deepwater environments.
Killer whales are apex predators, as no animal preys on them.
So what exactly is new in this paper?
Also note that multiple species can be "apex predators" in an ecosystem.
Isn't that the normal scenario of an apex predators appearance? Which is why I am asking, or is this a false assumption?
Not surprising.