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.
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...
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!
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?
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.
Maybe it’s just that we don’t live in their environment.
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.
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?
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.
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...
I don't think the one reported bite counts as an attack.
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.
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.
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...