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Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

There is at least one well-documented case of a pod of orcas understanding enough about people and boats for them to to initiate a mutually-beneficial and reciprocal understanding of how to cooperate in hunting whales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...

Given this, I think it is conceivable that these orcas may have achieved some sort of understanding of fishing boats as competing with them for their food, and developed a hostility towards boats as a result.

IIRC, not all orca pods hunt whales or other marine mammals, and many are generally fish eaters. I would not be at all comfortable in a life raft or similar boat in the presence of orcas that do hunt seals or emperor penguins.

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If orcas live for decades, have memories, and have language, then they're telling each other stories about us. The Southern Resident Killer Whales are down to 70+ beings. They've probably figured out by now that humans are the ones responsible for their food supply getting decimated. I suspect orcas everywhere are trying to figure out ways to communicate with us and are doing an amazing job.

They probably haven't accounted for human denial and human-centric science. These two things lead to scientists being like "Gee! I wonder why they're parading their dead babies and carrying them around? They must be grieving!"

As opposed to a slightly more realistic interpretation:

"They must be grieving and are trying to tell us 'See what you're doing to us?'"

By the way, the solution to their food supply issue is to breach the dams on the Snake River that are mostly only staying online to sustain the jobs of the people working on them. The salmon that spawns on the river saw its numbers plummet and have remained low ever since....for decades.

https://damsense.org/

That casts the "wearing a dead fish" thing mentioned elsewhere in a darker hue.

Yeah, looking for the simplest biological explanation, shortcirtuiting having to recognize life, is incredibly demeaning. Reminds me of the whole "babies/animals can't feel pain" thing. Sure, they act like they're hurt, but how do we know that's not just triggered responses to stimuli? FFS.

I've never considered Occam's Razor as a tool of oppression until this comment. Thank you for this perspective.

There are several subtypes. The most common are the transient, resident, and offshore orcas, but these are all located in the Pacific Northwest. (I believe there's a fourth, rarely observed one in this area, but I can't remember the name.) Several other subtypes exist, such as the rarely seen Type D pod in the Southern Ocean. If I recall correctly, the orcas attacking these boats are tuna specialists. Fish-eating orcas typically concentrate one a single or just a couple of species of fish, which explains why they're upset.

Orcas are highly intelligent, and it's my opinion that they know exactly what they're doing and are frustrated with the competition.

I think the running assumption should be that orcas are as intelligent as humans. Their brains are much larger and have more complex/dense folds than ours. They're also more socially bound than us, likely giving them a higher emotional intelligence.

Intelligence evolves in response to environmental pressures. Other than being mammalian, I doubt that orca and human intelligence can really be compared. Orcas don't have agriculture or industry. They just live naked in their environment and hunt. Their intelligence might be something like that of a pre-homo-sapien hunter tribe.

You are conflating intelligence with technology. Orcas live in the water and do not have hands. It is impossible for them to develop writing systems or agriculture due to their environment. If we put a human in water, assuming a human could survive in open water, we’d quickly realize the human is powerless to develop these things as well.

The modern day human brain is essentially identical to the earliest hunter-gatherer humans. Those groups did not have writing systems, industry, agriculture, etc., and yet their intelligence remains equal to ours. It is my suspicion, based upon my reading of orca behavior and biology, that such is the case with orcas. Even modern-day hunter-gatherer societies do not have writing systems or agriculture.

On a related note, I would even argue that our modern technology exposes the limits of human intelligence, particularly that of social and emotional intelligence.

Orcas appear to have quite high social and emotional intelligence in addition to their more raw intelligence of problem solving, teaching, and language.

The biology is rather clear. Their brains are very complex, even more so than ours when it comes to folds. The areas of their brains relating to social and emotional processes are bigger, relatively speaking, than the corresponding areas in human brains.

It is tempting to rate their intelligence lower because they don’t have tractors or rockets, but I think this is mistaken. Nearly every piece of research shows that they’re more intelligent and complex than we previously thought.

"Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much— the wheel, New York, wars and so on— while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man— for precisely the same reasons."

(Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish)

> Orcas don't have agriculture or industry. > They just live naked in their environment and hunt.

That was also true of Homo Sapiens for quite a while. We have the same brains for thousands of years, which is adaptable enough for both hunger-gathering, as well as rocket science.

Orcas don't have hands and live underwater. That may put a damper on their industry.

> Orcas don't have agriculture or industry.

Ants have agriculture and industry. Ants are the only other species (besides humans) that are capable of civilization.

Perhaps intelligence is not as important a factor as we think. :)

Interestingly, there's almost no documentation of orcas attacking humans in the wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orca_attack . While there seem to be some cases of attacking boats, wikipedia lists only a single known instance of a human being bitten by a wild orca. It's actually rather surprising, considering they are an apex predator with a highly varied diet. Though it's said most attacks by sharks are a case of mistaken identity, and with better intelligence and echolocation an orca is far less likely to make that mistake.

Randall Munroe of the New York Times wrote about this recently in a column[1] comparing orcas and sharks. He quoted a marine biologist who attributed the rarity of attacks to infrequent encounters between humans and orcas. They don't tend to hang around places where people are swimming.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/science/sharks-killer-wha...

That's not really true. Orcas are one of the most widespread species and are almost always associated with coasts.

The reason for difference of attacks is biology and intelligence. Sharks are basically one big system of sensors, and they attack basically anything that triggers those sensors. Orcas have a much, much higher intelligence (on the level of humans, in my opinion), and so they probably see humans the same way we see sloths. That is, we're curious about them, but they would make for a nasty and rather pointless meal.

Orcas also have generational memory, so for certain pods, humans are probably known to them and they'd rather not directly engage.

People paddle with the Orcas every day in the PNW - they have plenty of opportunities to attack humans.

Seeing "Randall Munroe of the New York Times" and not, "The Internet's own, Randall Munroe, of xkcd.com fame" was weird and wonderful all at once :D

There has never been a case of a known orca attack on a human in the wild. They are only known to attack when we confine them.

From the wikipedia article cited above...

In 1989 American researcher Bernd Würsig published an article about him having been attacked by a killer whale on a beach of Valdes Peninsula. A single individual, possibly as big as 9 metres (30 ft), beached towards him while he was watching sea lions about 200 metres (650 ft) from him in hope to take a photograph of a killer whale hunt. Dr Würsig ran up the beach after the animal missed him by about 1 metre. He speculated that the whale might have mistaken him for a pinniped.[19]

> Dr Würsig ran up the beach after the animal missed him by about 1 metre.

So he wasn't actually attacked?

i guess we'd have to read the linked article from that bibliography to see what he said.

I tried finding it, but could not, but it's in German and the title says he was attacked (for who knows what definition).

Then again if an Orca swallowed a human in the water, there's would be much left in the way of evidence.

They actually leave lots of evidence. A transient eating a seal is messy business and there are lots of seal bits and chunks left over. Eva Saulitis describes the aftermath in several cases in her book (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/219235/into-great-s...). IIRC, fishing the evidence out of the water is one of the primary ways they study killer whale diets.

Doubt it's a matter of confinement, and more of continued exposure to Orcas.

Put a person around an Orca for long enough, and eventually, the odds are reasonable that the Orca will kill them.

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