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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

Orcas have notoriously selective taste preferences that tend toward nutrient dense fatty foods. They can eat anything and different pods will narrowly specialize in different types of prey, but it is quite apparently a choice based on regional preferences. These food preferences are passed down over generations. Not terribly unlike human cultures.

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.

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> 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.

Consider whaling, by killer apes.

Whales probably don't know what apes are, I mean how many live near an ocean?

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?

They know what humans are, and certainly have some way of calling us.

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.

The probably understand we drive the small boats, and that small boats arejust weird wood logs. I expect them to generalize from there to transatrantics.

Floating objects can carry seals, and orcas can dislodge seals from floating objects by sending large waves in the right direction. They are definitely very interested in the relationship between floating objects and their passengers.

Using some kind of paddle as a method of propulsion should also be a familiar concept to any animal that has flippers.

My understanding from anecdotes[1] is that it's common for dolphins to play with small boats by intentionally getting the humans' attention (e.g. splashing water on them), and a lot of sailors think they understand that humans control the motion of the boat. Though it is sketchy anecdotes.

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...

Consider that the whale has something like an ultrasound scanner integrated into it's sensory system. I wouldn't be surprised if the whale knows more about how the boats are built than the humans driving them.

> 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?

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).

It's probably more then just being smart enough to realize that we're not worth the effort - Orca echolocation presumably gives them a comprehensive insight into just what's going on inside us regarding composition.

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.

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