https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/marine-animals...
https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/wild-orcas-offer-h...
The second video looked significantly more promising, however the video cuts away before we can actually see what the whale does.
Unless I watch a third video and start seeing some very clear dog-playing-fetch-like behavior, I’m marking this one as highly implausible.
edit: I originally wrote out a long comment about exactly why your comment doesn't make sense to me, but after posting it I felt it was ridiculously long for its purpose, so if you want to waste time reading it you can find it here - https://pastebin.com/Y11P8ETs - but I think asking you to explain what you meant more clearly is enough for here :)
I think I didn't manage to see that meaning because the comment it was replying to had nothing to do with humans thinking orcas want to eat them, it was about orcas bringing food (like dead fish) to give to the humans. So more like a pet cat bringing a dead mouse to its owner than a cat in the garden fearing that the human wants to eat it?
I’d probably be nervous if I was sailing on the Atlantic Iberian coast and saw orcas, they’ve been ramming and pushing rudders and fucking around with sailboats, no thanks.
ETA: swores mentions this in their pastebin
Not being afraid of orcas is a show of lack of respect for them. They can weight up to 10,000 pounds, swim at bursts of 35 mph, swim at slower speeds for huge stretches, launch their bodies tens of feet out of the water, and kill anything from salmon and rays to great white sharks, humpback whales, and even blue whales. There is a lot of argument that they may be the greatest predator ever, on land or sea.
A domestic cat can easily wound a human and can usually get away. That is not true of a human in the water and an orca.
Yes, orcas are extremely, extremely intelligent, and there's zero reason for them to eat us for nutrition, as they are highly tuned eaters that maximize their calorie intake per effort. However, a human is completely within an orca's decision process as to whether the human lives or not.
But to me, the interesting question is how the orcas worked out how the great whites had livers in the first place, and why they are the best bits (big bits) to eat? I hope the are not going to investigate mine, but they don't seem interested - yet. See two orcas not eating two teeny humans: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y8iipFTBanc
As long as they can still obtain their chosen food, it seems that they do not have any incentives for experimenting with alternative foods, like teeny humans.
When whales, seals, penguins, sharks etc. will disappear, that might change.
I can understand why (for example) big cats are scared of guys carrying AK47s (or even a pointed stick - hello, Maasai), and will run away. But the orcas really can't experience that, and don't seem scared of us at all. Lots of examples of sperm whales attacking humans (see Moby Dick) but none of orcas doing it. I know there are those yacht-bothering things off Spain.
It is strange. Unless they are going to leave us (Douglas Adams) or are just waiting to be our inheritors, which is looking more and more likely.
The animals which do not tolerate other animals of their own species and which will attack them and fight with them are also very likely to attack humans when they believe that humans have invaded their personal space. For example, an adult bear will never be truly friendly with a human, even with a human that has raised it as a cub, because adult bears are never friendly with other bears, but they attack any intruders. On the other hand, a wolf raised by a human can become tame and attached to the human, like a wild wolf would behave towards its real parents.
Similarly, male sperm whales fight viciously with any other male sperm whales and they also do not hesitate to attack any boats with humans that harass them.
AFAIK, intra-specific fighting is not frequent among orcas, but they are used to have good relations between them, even with some from different pods. This may explain their lack of aggressivity against humans, as long as they are not perceived as a possible prey.
The liver is like right there inside the shark. Open it up and have a look, and take a small bite of all the bits and figure out which tastes best. Might need to cooperate with a friend.
On a related note, they synthesize reflections in their communication.
I'm not sure it is so much the humans hiring the whales as opposed of the whales hiring the humans :D
Partly because there are animals with larger brains which we now know are not very intelligent, with no assumptions needed, and partly because some of the most intelligent non-primate animals that we know of actually have very small brains - like crows and other birds in the corvid family.
The largest brains belong to elephants and cetaceans, and both are among the most intelligent animals. However comparing their brain size to that of primates would not provide useful information, because for both elephants and cetaceans large parts of their brains are dedicated to the control of various functions of their large bodies that we do not consider as relevant for "intelligence", including things like trunk control and echolocation.