Orcas Have Been Trying to Feed People

Wild orcas on more than 30 occasions in four oceans have attempted to share their prey with people, potentially to develop relationships with humans, researchers have found.

In each of the instances recorded over two decades, orcas approached a person within a length of the orca's body, and dropped freshly hunted prey in front of the human, then waited for a response, according to a paper published June 30 in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Orcas of every age tried to share their prey, and just about everything was on the menu: sea otter, harbor seal, common murre, gray whale, green turtle, eagle ray, starfish, jellyfish, ocean sunfish, and on and on. Prey sharing is common in orca culture.

So, just what are the orcas doing, offering food to people?

Researchers ruled out play because the incidents lasted only about 30 seconds. It's mostly young orcas that play, and orcas of every age offered food. It's exploration, the scientists surmised: The orcas are curious to see what happens if they offer us food.

In most instances, the researchers ignored the offer. But when some took the food and offered it back, the orca either passed it back again or took it and shared it with its relatives.

Jared Towers, executive director of Bay Cetology, a research nonprofit based in Alert Bay, B.C., was on a boat off the northeastern end of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, when a transient orca offered a freshly-killed harbor seal pup. "You are left with a feeling of disbelief in the moment, did that just happen?" Towers said in an interview. "I just froze; you don't naturally want to reach out and grab something a killer whale just left in front of you. Before you realize what is happening, they retrieved the item and swam away."

Talking with other whale researchers, Towers learned they, too, had experienced orcas trying to share food. In waters all over the world.

Sometimes it felt more like fetch. Towers recalled a seabird brought to him by an orca alongside his research boat. "I collected it and chucked it back in the water, and the killer whale picked it up and brought it back to me," Towers said.

Another researcher, Vanessa Prigollini, of the Marine Education Association (MAREA) in La Paz, Mexico, said the orcas' behavior was "indicating their interest in building relationships outside their own species."

No one should be surprised, said Carl Safina, author of multiple books on animal intelligence, "Humans basically give no credit to any other creature for having a mind," Safina said. Yet many other creatures, including orcas, understand implicitly that humans have minds. "So they understand us, and give us more credit there, they seem to comprehend the world better than we do, in our self-imposed estrangement."

This loneliness is a specifically Western affliction, Safina said, noting many Indigenous societies worldwide understand themselves to be in relation with a vast intelligence of other nonhuman beings. "They see the world as one big family; it's only Western humans who continually ask or are afraid to say that other creatures are even conscious," Safina said.

That stance has consequences: "It's the devaluation of the physical world and everything that lives in it that has facilitated the recklessness and the destruction and the unthinking cruelty that we seem to continually generate," Safina said. "To me, the surprising thing is how deeply and insistently we refuse to get that we are in a world of relatives." However, he is not surprised that an orca making a kill would invite us to their feast.

"Interacting with them would be a big plus," he said of wild animals in general. "But it often goes so terribly wrong, because people do it so badly."

Having seen a photo of humans pouring beer and pretzels into the open mouth of a dolphin approaching their boat, he hopes that people will not take orcas up on their offer to engage.

This story by Lynda V. Mapes, who specializes in coverage of the environment, natural history, and Native American tribes, appeared in The Seattle Times on June 30. Undercurrent takes all responsibility for editing.