Of Orcas and Men: What Killer Whales Can Teach Us

by David Neiwert

Salish Sea and northern Vancouver Island. These whales moved together in large pods, sometimes even convening in gigantic “superpods” of fifty whales and more, and they fed strictly on fish.

also observed other whales who behaved quite differently, moving in small pods of three to five (or even less, sometimes), swimming not in the deeps where the fish were but in the shallows, where the seals and sea lions upon which they mostly fed could be found.

At first he thought these were renegade or outcast whales;

it became clear they were actually a separate population, a different kind of killer whale than the residents. They named them “transients,” and indeed these were whales who would roam extraordinary distances, from the coast of California to the Queen Charlotte Islands (or Haida Gwaii), and everywhere in between, including the Salish Sea. They looked different: The females’ dorsal fins were more triangular and pointed in appearance; their saddle patches were a solid, uniform grey; and the whales in general were often more nicked up and scratched. In addition, they did not vocalize heavily while hunting, unlike the residents, relying instead on stealth

Unlike their salmon-eating counterparts, the transients were not warm and cuddly sea creatures to observe but were brutally efficient killers who could tear apart a harbor seal (which comprised over 60 percent of their diet) in seconds.

They were seeing upwards of 1,500 seals in the canal, putting stress on the local fish and mollusk populations. Then, early in 2003, a large group of 11 transient whales showed up in Hood Canal and began devouring the seals for weeks on end. It was somewhat unprecedented, since transients rarely ever stay longer in a single place than a day or two at most.

Then the whales disappeared, although in 2005, after the seals rebounded to number about 1,200 in Hood Canal, another group of six transients took up occupancy there, this time for over five months. Dubbed “the slippery six” by locals, they too spent plenty of time feasting on harbor seals. The seal overpopulation problem went away—scientists estimated the whales ate half the population

Watching transients hunt can be simultaneously appalling and enthralling. Among their prey are Dall’s porpoises, which are among the fastest animals in the water where they can reach 35 mph. However, orcas, even more remarkably, are perfectly capable of keeping up with them, despite their significantly greater size, mainly by “porpoising,” thrusting themselves powerfully forward through the air in a series of linked leaps.

These mammal-hunting whales, it appeared, formed fairly large but broadly dispersed communities that ranged over wide stretches of territory with an ultimately well-defined reach. These orcas formed smaller pods but, within their own communities, were also remarkably cooperative.

hostile nature, with the residents—who always outnumbered the transients—chasing their mammal-eating neighbors away. Scientists aren’t sure why, but they speculate that perhaps at some level the transients could pose a threat to the residents’ young calves. Not only was there no social overlap between the populations, but there was no communication between them, either. Resident orcas used an entirely different set of calls from transients when communicating and used them in entirely different fashions. It was a biologically unusual situation for two populations of the same species to occupy the same space (or waters) and to observe completely different behaviors, including diet and

The only word for this is culture, and there is only one other species that has exhibited it: human beings. About the only thing the resident and transients had in common was their echolocation. Scientists began to wonder if there was even any genetic connection. Finally, in 2003, the genetics results came in, and the answer was definitive. There had been no genetic interaction between resident and transient killer whales for somewhere between 150,000 and 700,000 years. To put that in perspective: Homo sapiens has been on the planet only about 200,000 years.

Residents and transients had not interbred for 150k-700k yrs

stop calling these orcas “transients.” Their new name: Bigg’s killer whales.

realization, in the mid-1980s, that there was still a third population of killer whales in the North Pacific, dubbed “offshores,” who lived much farther out to sea and never came in to shore.

distinctive appearance and diet; their coloration was slightly different; they appeared to be smaller; their fin shape was also different than that of transients or residents; and they appeared to be eating deep-diving sharks. They also communicated with a completely distinct set of calls.

Offshores eat deep diving sharks

Orcinus orca might best be understood as a “species complex,” an umbrella term for a species, disparate populations of which technically can interbreed (sperm

from a male North Atlantic killer whale, as we have learned from orcas in captivity, can impregnate a Northern Resident female), but who choose not to for various reasons that are purely cultural, setting up disparate “ecotypes” with distinctive behaviors, communications, diets, and cultures.

North Pacific, North Atlantic, and Southern Ocean killer whales represented three species that were “independently evolving lineages” and deserved species status.

“species complex” concept as a middle course, based on what he had observed about them, particularly their “social exclusivity,” which he explained “predisposes whales to form diverse, genetically isolated populations—incipient species, effectively.” If the whales survive, he says, “we could be lucky enough to be witnessing the early stages of an adaptive radiation of killer whales whereby a variety of new species will exploit diverse ecological niches—

ten different ecotypes of killer whales that scientists recognize under the “species complex” approach, divided by Northern and Southern hemispheres.

10 diverse evotypes of killer whales under spevies complex theory

cetaceans in the world—not just in the Pacific Northwest, but in Alaska as well—the more we learn about these highly social animals, the more we realize how little we actually know. All told, there are over 900 of these animals in the North Pacific, including about 80 Southern Residents from the Salish Sea, 200 Northern Residents from northern Vancouver Island, about 500 resident whales in the Gulf of Alaska, and another 100 or so elsewhere in southeastern Alaska. Highly stable social creatures, their communications are sophisticated, gregarious, and enduringly mysterious. Their fish-eating diet renders them vulnerable to overfishing

whenever the two happen to coincide in the same area, the reaction uniformly has been that the residents drive the Bigg’s whales away. Bigg’s whales primarily eat harbor seals (over 60 percent of their diet), but they pretty much devour everything within reach: sea lions, harbor and Dall’s porpoises, even seabirds and squid (not to mention the odd moose). Their social structure is matriarchal but is considerably more fluid than that of resident pods, and they tend toward smaller pod sizes. They also are less inclined to large social gatherings. Scientists estimate that there are about 350 of these whales

Offshore Killer Whale The existence of these whales, who live in the open sea of the North Pacific and travel as far south as southern California and as far north as Kodiak, Alaska, was first noted by whale-watch tourists in 1988 and confirmed in 1990, but the difficulty in studying them (the waters they occupy are among some of the most notoriously rough if not outright lethal) leaves scientists with little information. They are physically smaller than both residents and transients, and their saddle patches are very faint, making them tricky to ID.

200 of these whales, but many more have not been photographed. Based on documented predation, they are believed to feed primarily on deep-diving Pacific sleeper sharks. Three offshore killer whales who washed up dead along the coast of western British Columbia were found to have teeth worn down almost to the gums, something never seen in other Pac...

mostly in the waters around Norway where they number around 700 and Iceland where there are about 400 of them. They also appear off the northern coast of Scotland.

Eastern North Atlantic Killer Whale, Type 2 These whales mostly occupy the waters around Ireland and Scotland and number about 400.

During the winter, they migrate northward to warmer climates, including some parts of the tropics. These orcas make appearances around New Zealand as well. They grow to over thirty feet in length and have distinctive saddle patches, and like other orca populations, appear to have a matriarchal social organization. It is also the largest orca population in the world, numbering around 15,000. (All told, the four Antarctic orca populations comprise over 70 percent of the world’s estimated total population of 100,000 orcas; one survey put the total Antarctic population at 80,000.)

Largest subtype

These really are only the best known and documented populations of killer whales. The complete list of populations includes the killer whales who inhabit New Zealand’s waters much of the year, feeding primarily on rays and sharks and numbering about 300; rare, white

Rare white orcas and other populations

orcas have been observed among a population of some 700 killer whales off the coast of eastern Russia’s Kamchatka region;

Rare,white orcas

the genetic map demonstrates, clearly, is that killer whales have been gradually diverging into separate populations that are so culturally distinct that they have become biologically distinct as well; if not speciation

Genetic mapping of killer whale populations demonstrate cultural and biological distinctions bordering on speciation

whales of both sexes remain with their mothers for life. When the mothers die and leave behind two daughters with offspring, the daughters will then often split off into their own separate pods, while remaining associated generally during larger social occasions. Regardless, the males remain with their mothers. In the event of her death, male residents will sometimes disperse to other pods with which they were socially attached previously.

When J1 finally died in 2012, it was estimated that he was sixty years old. That same year, Granny, his mother, and the matriarch of the clan, turned 100. She was still alive as of 2015.

Home, for these whales, is not a place. Their home is each other. This profoundly affects the behavior of the killer whales, because the pod’s well-being is essential to their own. This is why, throughout killer whale societies, prey sharing is common. Cooperative behavior is the rule, and physical conflict is almost completely unknown. However, all this is only strictly true of the resident killer whales of the North Pacific, including those in southeastern Alaska and western British Columbia, which have a chief common trait of being strictly fish-eating orcas, with Chinook salmon comprising over 80 percent of their diet. Their other common trait is that they tend to socialize in larger

Home is not a place for these whales it is a pod-eachother

Resident salmon-eating orca have been observed apparently driving salmon into underwater cliff walls, confusing the fish and making them easy pickings, even for young orcas.

At other times, orcas will be observed chasing salmon toward their waiting comrades, all then sharing

herding herring into balls as a group, a technique called “carousel feeding.” After forming the balls, they slap the fish with their powerful flukes, stunning them and rendering them easy to scoop up by the mouthful,

handing prey off to one another and then joining the feast

frequently observed acting like wolf packs when pursuing and killing humpback whales, spending hours chasing the whales, exhausting them by taking turns at harassing them, until one or two of them finally make the kill, and then all the members of the pursuing pod take part in the ensuing meal,

to avoid being stung by their prey. One whale will grab the ray in its mouth and flip it over, rendering it immobile, at which point its partner will swoop in and make the kill.

Along the shores of the Valdes Peninsula in Argentina, killer whales hunt for young elephant seals by beaching themselves and snatching their prey off the shoreline. Adults have been observed teaching young orcas this technique by

Antarctic orcas when working to force seals they are hunting off ice floes. They do this by lining up and swimming as a team directly at the floe, creating a large wave that then washes the seal off the ice and into their waiting jaws.

feed exclusively on Chinook, but appear to insist on eating only Chinook from the Fraser River in British Columbia. Samples taken from their foraging and excrement indicate that when the orcas are in the interior waters of the Salish Sea, they are only eating Fraser Chinook in spite of the presence of abundant Chinook from other watersheds.

“Orcas’ behavior is almost totally governed by cultural conditions and hardly at all by what we were taught in school about instincts and stimulus response and animal behavior in general,

Cultural conditions vs instinct, stimulus response

Each distinct population has its own “dialect,” its own set of stereotyped calls that it uses when communicating with fellow pod members. The immediate linguistic function of these calls is not entirely known, although in one study of the structure of the calls, it was concluded that many of the sequences of the calls relayed broad motivational information and that certain sub-classes of vocalizations apparently contain “more subtle information on emotional states during socializing.

relatively sophisticated societies and a comparatively complex culture—compared, that is, to other animal societies. Compared to human society, on the other hand, it appears to be fairly simple. Similarly, the surface simplicity of the killer whales’ communications, as Justin Gregg would argue, does not appear to qualify these communications for the term “language” as we know it, since it is not clear at all that there is any great complexity to them.

sheer absence of internal strife and the predominance of cooperation,

“They have hierarchies of dominance, beginning with the matriarchs, but there’s no sign of discipline, there’s no jousting for position. You only see occasional scuff marks or rakes, mostly on young ones. But they don’t butt heads; they don’t beat each other up.

“Then, one of the few universal behaviors that they have is that they do not harm humans. They are unique among apex predators that way. So it’s clear that even though they are capable of extreme forms of aggression—just ask their prey—the prevailing ethos of their culture keeps them from harming each other and from harming other life forms ...

Latin “Orcus,” one of the Roman gods of the underworld—the one who punished broken oaths. He became associated with demons and was the source of J.R.R. Tolkien’s word for a kind of goblin: orcs. Orcinus orca roughly translates as “demon from hell.

Spanish-speaking Basque whalers, who pursued some of the same baleen whales as orcas and saw them as competitors, named them

asesina baleenas, “whale killers.” The name, transposed and slightly mistranslated in English as “killer whales,” stuck.