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Are Orca Whales Friends or Foes?
The stories we tell about orcas might say more about us than about them
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December 18, 2023
Are Orcas Friends or Foes?
The stories we tell about orcas might say more about us than about them
By Carin Leong
[An orca whale with cartoon devil horns and a trident faces off against an orca whale with angel wings and a halo]
jonmccormackphoto/Getty Images (left); Martin Ruegner/Getty Images (right); Carin Leong/Scientific American
[Illustration of a Bohr atom model spinning around the words Science Quickly with various science and medicine related icons around the text]
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Carin Leong: Orcas have been all over the news recently.
[CLIP: News montage]
Leong: Earlier this year the story of orcas ramming into yachts off the Spanish coast kind of took off.
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[CLIP: News montage]
Leong: People on the Internet were calling them allies, hoping that they would sink billionaires and making other jokes about orcas being behind the Titan submersible tragedy.
Then there are stories of orcas ripping great white sharks to pieces and antagonizing all sorts of sea creatures from minke whales to porpoises.
I found it fascinating that these hero and villain narratives exist at the same time—that these charming, silly, sympathetic animals could just as easily be cast as mean bullies. So to answer my question, I thought I’d ask some killer whale scientists to humor me in a game show I’m calling ...
[CLIP: Game show music]
Leong: [deep, echoey voice] Orcas: Friends or Foes?
I’m Carin Leong, and you’re listening to Science, Quickly.
[CLIP: Audience clapping]
Leong: Ladies and gentlemen, sea enthusiasts and skeptics alike, welcome to this one-time and one-time-only game show! I’m your host, Carin, and today we dive into an exhilarating journey that will challenge your perceptions of one of the ocean’s most iconic inhabitants. Are they allies or total assholes? Welcome to Orcas: Friends or Foes?
For years we’ve been fascinated by these magnificent creatures. But today we’re delving deeper. We’ll be speaking with scientists who have spent years studying orcas and know them inside and out. Are orcas truly the ocean’s heroes, or do they deserve the less flattering reputation of being aquatic troublemakers?
On one side, we have Team Friends.
[CLIP: Audience clapping]
They argue that these cetaceans exhibit complex social structures, possess remarkable communication skills and live in tight-knit families that enable knowledge to be passed down through generations. On the other side, we have Team Foes ...
[CLIP: Audience clapping]
Who point to instances of orcas displaying tyrannical behavior in their hunting and often fatal play. They argue that the ruthless nature of these apex predators has earned them a darker reputation.
The game is simple: while our scientists won’t be taking sides, they’ll help us untangle the orcas’ behavioral track record to evaluate the true nature of these creatures and how we relate to them. Representing them, we have Robert Pitman of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University …
Robert Pitman: My name is Bob Pitman.
Leong: … and Michael Weiss of the Center for Whale Research.
Michael Weiss: Yeah, they’re just the coolest.
Leong: Up first ...
Leong: Team Friends!
[CLIP: Bell dinging three times]
[CLIP: Orca calls]
Leong: We’ll start with a story from Bob. While surveying some whales out in Antarctica ...
Pitman: I was wondering, “Gosh, I wonder if these killer whales even know we’re here.” So I made a snowball and threw it at one because they’re swimming by, right in front of us, you know, six feet away in some cases.
Leong: The snow, he says, was so hard and dry that he could barely make a snowball out of it. So he threw it, and when it hit, it just kind of turned to powder.
Pitman: And I didn’t think this adult female even knew what happened. But she stopped instantly and kind of gave a little shudder and then sank, and I thought that was going to be it.
But a piece of ice about the size of a basketball started moving through the still ice and came out into the middle of the channel.
And then the same killer whale came up right next to it, and she bent her head down and flicked this piece of ice into the air. And she did this for about 10 minutes.
And, you know, to this day, I have to believe I taught a killer whale how to throw a snowball.
Leong: Orcas are a lot like us. They’re ridiculously smart and have an incredible capacity for social learning. They have a similar****life span and reproductive life and social structures. Interestingly, they also have social trends, just like us, that can be seen as the equivalent of pickleball or cold brew.
Weiss: I think the biggest parallel is they are a cosmopolitan top predator …
Leong: That’s Michael.
Weiss: … that uses culture and social information to adapt to a huge variety of ecosystems, which is exactly what we’ve done in our evolutionary history.
Leong: In the late 1980s, for example, an orca in Puget Sound was seen swimming around with dead salmon on its head. Then other teen orcas started doing the same thing, and it became known to scientists as the “salmon hat” fad, a fashionable summer trend that lasted all of six weeks.
The fad this summer in British Columbia was playing with crab traps. Off the Iberian Peninsula, though, the trend of sinking boats seems to be sticking around with enduring popularity. Just this month another boat succumbed to a similar fate after being attacked.
Weiss: I think they are like teenagers looking for something to do with their day off.
Leong: Killer whales also live in highly complex social groups where mothers teach their kids everything they need to know. Moms who go off hunting will drop their babies off to roll around in patches of kelp like they’re at an orca day care—which is just adorable. Both male and female calves stay with their mom their whole life.
And it’s hard to overstate how strong these bonds are.
Weiss: J35 is, I think, is special to all of us. She had a, a few years ago, she had a calf that died really soon after being born. We got a report that there was a new calf with her, and that was about an hour before we actually got on scene, and by the time we got there, the calf was gone.
And she then carried that calf around for 17 days. She kind of switched between carrying it around on her rostrum, so having it kind of draped over her rostrum, and also, you know, having a pectoral flipper or the fluke, kind of gently, gingerly held in her mouth.
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