Are there any definitive reasons as to why killer whales haven’t targeted humans?
Orcas are very smart. Humans, even if we met their taste profile, are not a repeatable food source they can specialize in hunting. They may also recognize that eating humans comes with unknown risks because they are pretty observant of what humans are capable of.
Idk about that. We have some skills but orcas see basically none of them. From their perspective we are slow and bad swimmers who need to breath all the time.
Would an orca even understand that we made and control boats/ship as opposed to that humans live on boats/ships the same way fleas live on a dog?
Mind you, i’m not saying orcas are stupid. What I’m saying is that the slices of our life they can observe are not impressive, and the impressive things we do are not readily observable to them.
However, they are almost certainly smart enough to understand how rowboats work and that humans control them. Orcas have been considering human boats for tens of thousands of years and they have human-like cultural transmission of knowledge; perhaps they could quickly adapt what they knew about rowboats to sailboats when those were invented, then motorboats.
[1] E.g. https://www.quora.com/Do-whales-know-that-big-ships-are-cont...
The first time they even encounter a boat? Probably not. But I believe they're probably smart enough to make the connection after repeated encounters with boats and humans (which I'm sure they'd notice are nearly always correlated).
But we are mammals like them and they'd probably realize the similarity given that we need air. Maybe they'd consider us some kind of killer land whale?
I'd imagine they don't consider us any similar to them. But they know those indestructible whale-like surface gliders are shocking full of us, and that we can kill a whale with way more easiness than them.
Using some kind of paddle as a method of propulsion should also be a familiar concept to any animal that has flippers.
For them killing sharks I'm sure it wasn't killing a few for kicks until they discovered the liver's were tasty. It was probably more like seeing hamburgers walking around.
Or they understand that we are dangerous to have as enemies. Either through recent observation or through some type of communication that has been passed down through the generations. It is not that long ago since we stoped killing killer whales; less than a hundred years, some of them might have been alive and still remember.
There are records of untrained killer whales hunting together with humans; so some of them certainly understand what we are capable of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tom_(orca)
Could well be that orcas are similar.
Seriously - food from the sea is different from land animals, not only in taste and texture. We may just seem too foreign to their palette, like snails are for us (pas toi).
Humans in the water also seem like low reward but minimal-effort.
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[1]: Yeah, I know, but I don't know.
did a killer whale write this