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Other than arguably the level of communication, every single thing you describe about orcas hunting applies to wolves hunting buffalo.

ETA: There's also the under appreciated communication aspect of canines (and orcas) ability to take and obey direction from others.

There's lots of research on how despite learning from mimicry, non-human primate intelligence might be relatively capped by this limitation.

Agree.

Wolves use a highly coordinated attack, where lead dogs harry the prey and are replaced as they tire.

Also, you need more than a simple strategy to take down an animal that can hurt you by kicking you with sharp hooves, poking you with antlers, or calling on 300 of it's close friends to trample you and your little pack to death.

It's not anything close to what's been observed in orcas.

The wolves vs. killer whales debate here is pretty intense.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8V97_DKfhw&t=0m44s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDJgv1iARPg&t=0m28s

Just the process of separating an individual from the herd shows such a great deal of coordination, especially in the case of the herd circling multiple calves or calves with mothers.

Watching ~6 wolves chase 6 candidate buffalo, then quickly joining forces as soon as one target makes a mistake is incredible to watch.

Same as when they taunt individuals to draw them out and attack the flank.

And while the verbal communication of orcas is impressive, the wolves use of howls when out of sight, and visual cues while in sight is no less impressive to me.

That is a big one, is it not? Do we call humans "wolves on two feet"?

Communication and cooperation are things orcas exhibit over and over. Also, wolves, as far as I know, are purely instinctual and do not communicate or pass down learned knowledge. Orcas do. There are several documented instances of one or a few individuals in an orca pod discovering some novel way to eat something or discovering a new animal altogether to eat that is then taught within the pod.

There's one specific hunting technique for mammal hunting orcas that has been observed that showcases this. When hunting mammals, who have excellent hearing and are intelligent themselves, orcas can sometimes reach a point where it's not working. So, the pod of orcas will resume chatting (vocalizing) and start to leave the area while they choose a single orca to stay silently behind. Once the other orcas leave, the mammals (usually seals) relax, giving the silent orca hiding a chance to capture. Once capture, the other orcas return to share the meal. Wolves don't do anything like that.

Wolves manage to cooperate fine, communicating with both howls and non-verbal cues.

What's more impressive (be it humans playing sports or pack predators hunting): a team calling an audible play while on the attack, or the team that is so well knit that it can accomplish the same without yelling it out loud?

>Wolves don't do anything like that.

Wolves will both silently stalk and drive/funnel prey to a waiting ambush. And they do vocally call for others to rejoin them when out of sight.

I'm not sure what better analog you might expect, given that wolves aren't pursuing above surface prey from underwater.

But would you discredit orcas for not climbing out of the water and chasing seals on the ice?

There is a lot of learned behavior in wolf hunting. Juvenile wolves go on hunts without direct participation to observe many times before participating. There is even specialization where faster members of a pack take on different roles.

The real difference is large wolf pray doesn’t escape the way seals can onto land but are significantly more dangerous to the wolves. Such prey can both out run them in most cases or severely injury them in direct confrontations, so wolves need to use deep snow, river banks, or extreme exhaustion methods. It’s actually more complex hunting behavior than Orcas vs whales, though adapted to different environments.

In terms of communication Alphas don’t seem to micromanage hunts the way Orcas do, but they will call them off etc. Which might relate to land being a more variable environment, you don’t run into random ditches in the open ocean.

With respect to the passing down of learned knowledge, I believe I read in the book 'Three Among the Wolves' that the author had observed a wolf pack teaching their young to be aware of and hide from small planes flying over (planes were dangerous to the wolves because hunters used them to hunt wolves in that area).

You don't see the cooperation and coordination in the video you just linked?

Not really. I see a lot of chaos.

I'm having trouble finding the statistics again, but I think the success rate of stereotypical pack or pride hunters like wolves or lions is actually quite low. Whereas it's my understanding that orca success rates are pretty high, despite hunting far more intelligent animals.

I appreciate the facts but you seem to be a bit angry as in blaming all humans for the plight of orcas. Putting all humans in the same category won't win anyone over to your cause.

Misanthropy can sneak in sometimes. I don't lump all humans, but I think it's a majority opinion amongst humans that we are the intelligent animal, and other intelligent animals are only to be compared to each other. Wolves are also cool, but I think it's a bit misleading to call orcas the wolves of the sea.

Orcas are actually only one of two animals in the world, other than us, to go through menopause. It's an interesting biological development that some estimate it is so older orca females (orcas are matriarchal societies) to not sexually compete with younger females and can concentrate on leading and teaching to pass down knowledge. Wild orca females live quite long.

Like I said, wolves are certainly amazing animals, but I feel orcas are on another level. And we don't cage wolves as brutally as we do orcas. That, I am angry about.

you'd be interested in joining orcasound slack: https://join.slack.com/t/orcasound/shared_invite/zt-bd1jk2q9...

We basically just talk about orcas and how we can decode their language moving towards bidirectional comm.

I am definitely interested and just signed up! Thank you for that invite. I'm obsessed with orcas and want to continue learning more.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many animals are smarter on average than humans are on average. I think that the only thing we really have on all other animals we know about is a developed system of writing.

>I wouldn’t be surprised if many animals are smarter on average than humans are on average.

This doesn't really make any sense. I realize it's fun to have opposite opinions of the majority on the internet but animals don't make complex tools, they don't have the ability for substantial transfer of information from generation to generation, and the complexity of communication in even the cleverest animals is very low compared to human language.

I'd be really surprised to learn there was a single lifeform on earth with anything approaching human level intelligence.

Dolphins, which obviously include orcas, actually have more complex brains than ours, including the folds, which makes the surface area of the brain larger for its overall volume. It's not just about "opposite opinions of ... the internet". It's an ongoing scientific discussion, and the trend is usually "they're smarter than we thought".

> they don't have the ability for substantial transfer of information from generation to generation

They have to do so vocally. Technology development doesn't necessarily correlate, positively or negatively, with intelligence. Orcas and whales at large are highly limited by their appendages and environments in terms of technology development.

> complexity of communication in even the cleverest animals is very low compared to human language

Are you able to understand orca what orcas "say"? That seems to be a very strong statement when we know quite little about what they're able to communicate. Furthermore, whales having echolocation have built-in transmitters and receivers that are in addition to their normal vocalizations and hearing. It seems weird to make claims about how they experience the world given no one really knows. But we can surmise the possibility based upon scientific facts.

> I'd be really surprised to learn there was a single lifeform on earth with anything approaching human level intelligence.

If you put a human brain in an orca body (accepting the hypothetical), what could that brain do in that body and environment? Very little with regards to technology development (writing, tool use, etc.).

You don't see the inconsistency between:

>Dolphins, which obviously include orcas, actually have more complex brains than ours

And this:

>>complexity of communication in even the cleverest animals is very low compared to human language

>Are you able to understand orca what orcas "say"? That seems to be a very strong statement when we know quite little about what they're able to communicate.

Are you able to understand what orcas "think"?

The physical structure of their brains is more complex. I thought that was clear from the follow-on context regarding their brains. Is it not a line of science to understand how brain folding contributes to intelligence? Further, orcas certainly show high levels of emotional and cooperative intelligence compared to humans. Sons stay together with their mothers throughout their lives in the same pods, and as far as I understand, there's relatively little, if any inter-pod fighting. They also readily share food throughout the pod. They are deeply connected to each other in a way that I think we have a hard time understanding.

This is a good book to take a look at: https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Thinkers-Inside-Dolphins-Porpois...

> Are you able to understand what orcas "think"?

No I do not, but one can surmise from the scientific study of them and behavioral observations. My point about them making a strong statement is that it isn't backed up by anything except a human-centric bias of intelligence.

And the person I replied to make an incredibly strong claim:

> complexity of communication in even the cleverest animals is very low compared to human language

That needs backing up. In the event that there is no backup, which I don't believe there is, then we have to leave possibility open, possibility that's informed by scientific and behavioral studies.

Assuming dolphin brains are complex bc "folds" isn't a stretch, but assuming animal communication isn't as complex as human language is?

They’re smarter than we though is not the same they’re smarter than us on average.

> they don't have the ability for substantial transfer of information from generation to generation

Right, we have writing. They do pass information on in the form of habits, hunting or otherwise. It took humans a long time (many many generations) to collectively have the concept of the number 0. The things we have figured out and spend years passing on in school are hard-won and written down. The few humans who do figure out fundamentally new concepts often interact through written collections.

It can help to view more specific attributes of intelligence to make comparisons. An easy one, when comparing carnivores/omnivores: how many species can they hunt? Many predators specialize, eating only a single other species. Giant Pacific octopuses have a wide diet. Humans are at the top, though. By a longshot.

How about math? There are other species that understand addition and subtraction, I think, but none that can do multiplication or division.

True, there are many metrics for intelligence. Humans also couldn’t do multiplication or division until we collectively had free time and a need to figure it out. Multiplication and division is not innate to our species, it’s something we learned and then wrote down.

Our species also knows how to make glass and refined metals and styrofoam and various concrete/mortar/brick formations. I doubt that anyone is an expert in all of the above and that most people in the developed world can only hope to obtain these things by going out and purchasing it from a store.

Furthermore, putting a bunch of intelligent but completely uneducated humans on an island is unlikely to result in a colony that understands multiplication and division in the next 100 or maybe even 1000 years.

Once humans are put into that setting (zero education), we are no longer comfortably at the top of the food-chain.

These are all excellent points that I think people forget about and assume that humans have attained some sort of innate intelligence due to our societies and technologies.

The ability to store information is a big technological leap. Even then, it's taken us as a species 5,000 years to get here once we had writing.

Multiplication and division predate writing by many centuries.

Also, humans were comfortably at the top for the food chain even before we needed arithmetic or writing.

(Arguably, we started to need arithmetic and writing because we ate all the animals.)

> Also, humans were comfortably at the top for the food chain even before we needed arithmetic or writing.

Definitely, except for lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, cougars, anacondas, pythons, sharks, crocodiles, alligators, bears, wolves, hyenas, coyotes, boars and ants, all of which have hunted humans and have maneaters among their ranks.

Humans were never apex predators... there was always something else that ate them, and though it is less often nowadays, it still happens.

Whatever virtue humans have as a species, it has nothing to do with being able to kill everything. I would call that an indulgence, not a virtue. Today, being able to kill something contributes nothing to survival. Compare effective hunting skills to skills that generate significant income. Money has far more to contribute to survival and procreation than having lethal hunting skills, an entirely worthless skill to have in nearly all modern societies. There are so few societies left where hunting is necessary, and we're talking about a few thousands or tens of thousands of people at most among 7B.

I'm specifically replying to this:

> Once humans are put into that setting (zero education), we are no longer comfortably at the top of the food-chain.

Which isn't true. Humans used to hunt mammoths way back when we had zero education. (Some even claim that we hunted them to extinction.)

It doesn't get really get more 'top of the food chain' than that.

> It doesn't get really get more 'top of the food chain' than that.

Sure it does. Aside from giant birds, crocodiles, and leopards, early humans likely had to contend with bears, sabertooth cats, snakes, hyenas, Komodo dragons, and even other hominins. As prey, the past was not a pleasant place for humans and our ancestors, because they were prey, not apex predators. You know, apex means nothing eats it. Just last year an alligator ate a man in Louisiana and they will again. That sort of disqualifies our species as "apex." The alligator is an apex predator because nothing predates them. Making sense yet?

Are there human groups that don't educate their children?

Human inventions and discoveries can definitely be lost/forgotten (the bow and arrow was forgotten at some point on the way to Australia, hence boomerangs and atlatls). People from cultures that don't have multiplication and division have the capability to learn it.

Yea, for cetaceans, all of which are highly intelligent in various ways, they are severely limited in technology development due to their environment and their appendages, which evolved to fit their environment. They have no way to develop writing or tools beyond basic tool use with their mouth.