Of Orcas and Men: What Killer Whales Can Teach Us

by David Neiwert

company of killer whales that we were at the mercy of those whales. That’s a good word for it. Indeed, in their encounters, “mercy” is the word I think most aptly describes the common response of orcas to humans. Unlike their counterparts among apex predators—say, grizzly bears or great white sharks—the encounters inevitably are benign and harmless. However, you can’t help but be acutely aware of the whales’ forbearance. They could easily bring you to grief, but they choose an intelligent path.

Study after study has demonstrated that whales in captivity are more than two and a half times more likely to die than whales in the wild.

Of the 136 orcas taken in captivity from the wild over the years, only 13 still survive. The average lifespan in captivity so far is about eight and a half years. In the wild, the average rises to thirty-one years for males and forty-six for females. Then there is the upper end of the spectrum. In the wild, males will live up to sixty years, and in the Puget Sound, there is a matriarchal female named Granny who is believed to be a hundred years old. Having met Granny up close in my kayak, I can attest that she remains spry and playful.

just stood there at the railing, watching her watching me. Soon I found myself almost overwhelmed with feelings of affection, of caring, for this whale.

According to the myths of the Kwakwaka’wakw tribes of northern Vancouver Island (also known as the Kwakiutl), the first men were killer whales who came to shore, transformed into land creatures, and then forgot to go back.

While humans have only been around for about 200,000 years as a species, killer whales have been the supreme creature in the ocean for about six million years, roughly thirty times longer. It could be they have something to teach us about staying atop the food chain.

Scientists point out that cetacean brains have a number of other structures apparently devoted to cognition that are absent in the brains of land mammals. There is very little of the orca brain devoted to the sense of smell, and perhaps more important, the lobe of the brain that ties its two halves together, known as the corpus callosum, is very small in orcas.

orca brains have something that humans and land mammals don’t, a highly developed set of brain lobes called the paralimbic system. Scientists aren’t sure what it does, but they speculate that it replaces the function of some other under-developed lobes in their brains that, in land mammals, are linked to spatial memory and navigation, as well as the brain-tying functions of the corpus callosum, or it may enable some brain function we can’t even envision because we lack it.

cetacean brains that required them to develop something, probably having to do with processing emotions in some other way, that caused this lobe to elaborate. We don’t know. “It is a very mysterious part, probably the most compelling part of the brain of orcas and dolphins. Because again, we’re not used to other animals having things that we don’t have, in our brain.”

highly developed amygdala, the part of the brain that’s associated with emotional learning and long-term memories. However, what catches the attention of nearly every brain scientist is the killer whale’s insular cortex, aka the insula,

insula has some very interesting functions in the mammal brain, including not only social cognition, but things that have to do with awareness, self-awareness,” she adds. “For instance, the insula is abnormal in people with obsessive-compulsive disorders. So there are things about the insula that have to do with attention, focus, thinking—it’s a very, very interesting part of the brain.”

Echolocation, a genuine sixth sense,

orcas’ amplified empathy? We can only blindly guess what that means. However, the longtime observations of many scientists and trainers that orcas exhibit complex emotions of a wide range and have a powerful, abiding empathy for each other and for humans as well is supported by the physiological evidence, too.

Orcas certainly exhibit plenty of parallels to humans.

engage in complex communications with each other in the calls, whistles, and clicks that they use when in proximity to each other in the wild and possibly in their echolocation signals, which enable them to see great distances underwater.

highly social animals and generally live in tight-knit families. They live about as long as humans (the females are known to live well into their eighties, while the males generally live into their fifties). They display ritual behavior, including “greeting ceremonies” that occur when large resident pods encounter each other after long seasons of hunting in separate

Food-sharing behavior is common. There are cultures, which may extend even into biological differences, displayed by killer whales who occupy the same waters. These salmon-eating resident killer whales with whom we were kayaking are the most commonly sighted orcas in the San Juan Islands, but there are also pods of so-called “transient” orcas (also known as Bigg’s killer whales, after the late Canadian researcher, Michael Bigg, who first identified them) who come trolling through as well. These whales do not eat much fish, but prefer instead to munch on seals, sea lions, and various other marine mammals, including Dall’s porpoises and Pacific white-sided

They have even been observed taking down moose that were swimming, as they are known to do, between islands in the Northwest’s abundant marine archipelagoes. Unlike resident orcas, transients are not very gregarious in the water, preferring to hunt in silence, although they will vocalize avidly after a successful kill. Their stealth also makes them rather scary to encounter in a small boat in the water. Resident killer whales and transient killer whales do not mingle. They hunt in different zones, the transients preferri...

do not encounter each other often. When they do, the resident orcas—who typically outnumber the transients, sometimes by significant amounts—aggressively chase the transients away. This may be why genetic tests indicate that transients and residents have not interbred in pe...

I purchased a hydrophone (a microphone for listening to underwater sound) several years ago so my family and I could listen in on the killer whales when they went past our kayaks; most of the time, in this way, we could hear them even from considerable distances. The sounds that we have heard over the years have always seemingly involved members of the pods communicating information to each other; the call and response interactions were clear, and the variety of the sounds made it obvious that this was not just random noisemaking.

the sounds we were hearing were part of these whales’ distinctive dialects, according to the researchers who study them. Southern Resident killer whales have a unique set of calls they use when talking to each other. These calls are similar to, but quite distinct from, calls used by Northern Residents from Vancouver Island and not even remotely like calls used by transient killer whales or killer whales in other populations who have been studied, including those in Iceland, Antarctica, and New Zealand. Moreover, researchers discovered that the orcas use discrete calls that identify them not just by their clan (that is, Northern or Southern Residents) but by their individual pods as well.

“We have been trying to find this Rosetta Stone for communications with orcas and dolphins, and everything we do applies some human-centered criteria—only because that’s really all we know, it’s all we can do.

She is not submerging but is, rather, drifting on the surface, in a behavior the scientists call “logging,” and heading more or less in my direction. She has a water bubble on her head. One of the features of orcas’ amazing hydrodynamic black-and-white skin, which is part of what enables them to move with such speed and grace underwater, is that water

actually flows through it. So when they come up to the surface, especially slowly, you will see them almost wearing the water like a membrane, until they finally burst through and make contact with the air.

that he can fly with grace and ease, as though gravity does not exist for him. That describes the ethereal daily life of killer whales: gliding sylphlike through their element, their large pectoral fins spread like wings, soaring above the canyons and cliffs of the ocean floor, swooping and diving weightlessly at their leisure, with intelligent minds that rule over all they survey. Their only real encounters with gravity occur when they play in the element—the air—that gives them such buoyancy in water. Orcas do more than merely breathe air; they leap into it with gusto, in events we call “breaching”.

The weightlessness of being is only the most obvious facet of an orca’s existence that distinguishes it from what man and his fellow primates experience. Even though they weigh thousands of pounds (tonnage that would render them slow and ponderous as land mammals, as it does elephants and whales’ long-distant cousin, the hippopotamus), a whale’s daily life is spent in a state of gravity-free seawater, buoyed especially by the lungs that are the legacy of having evolved from land mammals. This state almost certainly played a role in the evolution of whales as the largest creatures ever

since size does not have gravity-related energy costs associated with it in a water environment. Whales were free to evolve as large as they liked, even if they sacrificed agility and grace in the bargain, and many species did so, especially the baleen whales, who glide along the surface and with their furry plates eat tiny fish and shrimp floating there.

Orcas are somewhere in between these behemoths and land mammals. Like the larger whales, they are big enough to be extremely powerful, capable of overwhelming nearly everything in the ocean if they choose. However, since they are a smaller whale, they have retained much of the grace, agility, and speed of their fellow dolphins. Orcas can zoom through the water at speeds up to 34 miles an hour and then frolic and play like their bottlenosed cousins. Besides the relative weightlessness it imparts to air-breathers, one of the important qualities of water, since it is so much denser than air, is that sound travels extremely well in it.

Up close and over short distances, water is an even more effective carrier of sound waves—about four and a half times faster than when sound travels through air—

ear structures on the sides of their heads and highly evolved hearing mechanisms beneath that. Their chief conduit for hearing is their lower jaw. The lower jaws of cetaceans are not only fairly large, but they are also hollow, filled with a fatty material that collects sound and transmits it through the middle and inner ears and on to the auditory nerve. This structure means that not only are the most distant and subtle sounds detected, but all these sounds are processed by those big brains at lightning speed,

they not only are hearing sounds; they are making them at an extremely high rate, and this is not just for communicating but more importantly, as noted previously, for seeing. Orcas have very good vision with their eyes, located on each side of the head. They are able to see with about the same acuity and for the same distances as humans. However, for any seagoing creature, there is an inherent limit to how far the water itself will allow it

Under the clearest conditions, the farthest even a sharp-eyed orca can see underwater is several hundred feet. In the turbid waters of places such as the North Pacific, this visibility can drop to as few as ten feet.

odontocetes—that is, toothed whales—evolved a sixth sense we call echolocation. It is a kind of sonar, although comparing it to the comparatively crude system of sound detection that humans have devised through technology does little justice to how sophisticated a sense it really is. The sounds that orcas and dolphins emit sound to our ears, t...

large melon on the front of orcas’ heads is not, as many initially assume, where their brain is located; that is actually farther back in their skull, safely encased behind the eyes. The round melon is actually a large capsule of extremely fine oil, very similar to the sperm whale’s coveted oil that came from the so-called spermaceti organ, similarly located above the front jaw. As those gigantic relatives do, orcas use this oil sac for focusing and transmitting those sound bullets into the water. The melon is actually a lens for seeing with sound.

The sound bullets that come out of the melon are very dense packets of sound, not entirely dissimilar from the packets that transmit computer information electronically, and so when these sounds bounce back to the killer whales, they carry a broad spectrum of information. This apparently means that when this information is processed by that highly evolved and complicated brain, it renders the orcas capable of not merely detecting the presence of objects (as our sonar does) but rendering a clear and detailed vision of what is there in the water. Indeed, it goes beyond mere vision; orcas can see inside things. Because sound is actually capable of penetrating objects better than light,

Experiments conducted with captive orcas, for instance, have established that they (and other dolphins) are able to detect the nature and shape of objects hidden inside opaque containers. There are a number of anecdotes from female dolphin and orca trainers whose subjects began acting differently (in one case, protectively) around them, leading the trainer to later discover that she was pregnant.

“Dolphins naturally possess the most sophisticated sonar known to man,” boasted Braden Duryee of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific. The dolphins who found the torpedo were being trained in mine detection, and when they kept alerting their handlers to the presence of an object where none was supposed to be, they were asked to place a marker on the spot. When divers investigated, they found the old torpedo.

ultrasensitive hydrophone modeled after the design of killer whales’ middle ear, which employs a tympanic bone-and-plate complex to transmit sounds into the nervous system. The device the scientists constructed based on that model now allows researchers to capture a wide range of ocean sounds, from up to 160 decibels to the quietest whispers, and to do so accurately at any depth, something that was never possible with traditional hydrophone designs. “Orcas had millions of years to optimize their sonar, and it shows,” explained Onur Killic, one of the researchers. “They can sense sounds over a tremendous range of frequencies, and that was what we wanted to do.”

clicks are everywhere. It would be reasonable to hypothesize that what I am hearing is the whales busily hunting, rather than socializing. Since we can’t really see what they are doing underwater, however, we can only guess. What is fairly obvious is that this female is echolocating me heavily because she wants to keep an eye on me. Or perhaps more importantly, she is trying to alert the calf to my presence, as well as my position, so that it can avoid coming into contact with me. Then it strikes me. Echolocation is something that whales not only use for themselves, but something that they can share. The calf gets bounceback from the same sounds that its mother is emitting.

almost as though she is shining a sound flashlight on me so that her young charge, preoccupied with chasing fish, is aware of my presence and doesn’t get too close.

Dolphins were found to have the ability to “eavesdrop” on another dolphin’s inspection of an object. This may also help explain their social behavior when hunting, since the more orcas or dolphins there are lighting up parts of the water with their echolocation sounds, the better they all can detect and snag their prey.

The other striking thing about these Northern Resident whales is how little vocalizing is going on. This is somewhat unusual in my experience, which is mostly with the rather gregarious Southern Residents. On this day with this pod, there are very few of the squeaks, squonks, cries, calls, and various odd noises that killer whales produce in the process of communicating with each other.

I had often heard about Northern Residents that they were less playful than Southern Residents, less prone to the demonstrative behaviors such as spyhopping, tail-lobbing, and breaching that were the trademarks of their Southern relatives. I turned my attention briefly away from the big male and focused my camera on the female and calf, who were still relatively close to my kayak, musing to myself: It must be true—they certainly seem less demonstrative.

Even the way that orcas sleep is social, something shared.

You could tell they were asleep because the procession—kooosh kooosh kooosh in succession as they broke the surface of the glasslike water, rhythmic and slow and majestic—was clustered together closely, in a line, and surfacing only every forty-five seconds or so, coming up and going down as a group. I sat on my log and watched them. The only other sounds were the keening of the gulls that occupied much of the rocky beach. Every breath that killer whales take is voluntary and conscious; unlike most land mammals, most cetaceans do not have an involuntary-breathing mode.

Sleeping orcas Every breath is conscious

when they anesthetized dolphins and orcas in their care, it killed them, because they simply stopped breathing. Sleep, however, is a physiological requirement of every mammal on earth. So, when and how do they manage it? In the case of killer whales (and most dolphins), the trick involves shutting down only half of their brain during a given sleeping session, remaining just awake enough to swim, surface, and breathe, all in a slow, rhythmic pattern. In the wild, where orcas swim almost constantly, this is done in large pods of up to twelve whales, who line up in a wide arc and draft off each other’s wake as they rise, breathe, and submerge together.

This is something spectacular to see, even if the orcas are not at all playful when sleeping. There is nothing quite as moving as the sight and sound of a long row of killer whales surfacing one after another, the plumes hanging in the air, and then vanishing below the surface when the procession finally reaches the end of the row.

The silence follows, hanging there, for somewhere between 15 and 20 seconds, and then as certain as a clock, the first in line resurfaces again, a little further along on the same line of travel, and the whole row rises behind them, like fingers rising and falling on an oceanic piano, playing a syncopated melody.

Every ecotype of killer whale has been observed engaging in a form of prey sharing. Resident killer whales share salmon they have caught with other whales; transients and Antarctic whales share seal kills; North Atlantic orcas team up to herd herring

Prey sharing common among every ecotype

into balls; and New Zealand whales who hunt rays on the seafloor often team up to hunt them and then share their meals with one another. Moreover, these are animals who mostly remain with their familial group for every day and moment of their lives. Socializing is wired into orcas evolutionarily, at a level that dwarfs the comparatively loose social ties of humans. One of the logical consequences of this is that it requires an abundance of the quality that makes social life possible: empathy. By empathy, we mean not simply the ability to sense what other people and beings may be feeling, but to feel it ourselves, and then to act accordingly, perhaps contrary to one’s immediate self-interest or desires.

Socializing and empathy