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Comment by ProjectArcturis | Hacker News Reader

I think it's the converse: after we've hunted orcas to near extinction, that very intelligent species realized they were no longer the apex predator, and could never win against a land-based species. There are ZERO documented incidents of orcas attacking humans in the water. They've chosen a cultural taboo against hurting humans, in hopes that we would no longer see them as an enemy and stop hunting them. And it worked!

Guessing the rudder attacks are either teenage pranks or misunderstanding that boats belong to humans.

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Cetaceans have been recorded to have been non-aggressive, even helpful towards humans throughout history. That's why we have religious mythologies and regional/national mythologies in which cetaceans are told to save humans or they are treated as deities or spirit figures to appeal to.

300 years ago, if a fisherman got eaten by an orca, would that have been recorded as "eaten by an orca" or "eaten by a fish/sea monster"? It wasn't until the mid 18th century that cetaceans were asserted to not be fish, it took another century or more for this perspective to permeate popular culture.

For instance, in Moby-Dick (1851) Herman Melville dedicates an entire chapter to explaining the taxonomy of cetaceans and says they aren't fish because they breath air, have lungs, have horizontal tails, etc. But then he says whalers scoff at this distinction and consider them fish because they live in the water.

> 300 years ago, if a fisherman got eaten by an orca, would that have been recorded as "eaten by an orca" or "eaten by a fish/sea monster"?

300 years ago the society had names for these species. Especially local fishermen would know.

The word we use to describe them derives from the ancient greek "sea monster"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetus_(mythology)

> There are ZERO documented incidents of orcas attacking humans in the water.

Minor correction: Not in the wild.

In captivity, there have been some: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orca_attack

Yah but that is a bit of an extreme situation, you can't blame an intelligent sentient being that needs stimulation and freedom from turning murderous after it was abducted from its family in the wild and caged up in a tiny pool for an excrutiatingly decades long life. The violent part is putting orcas into that situation in the first place, they are orders of magnitude too smart and curious for that. The murder that followed can't really be said to be an example of a species being prone to attacking a human in general, it is a very specific set of circumstances.

> In captivity, there have been some: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orca_attack

I'll side with the orca on that one.

> There are ZERO documented incidents of orcas attacking humans in the water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Keltie_Byrne

i bet these teenagers attacking boats were hurt by a sail once… or some of them were and taught others (orca attack in Portugal region are not a phenomena exclusively to the article publication year) . orcas have different behavior patterns on different groups roaming the ocean

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