Clash off the South African Coast

On 18 June 2023, a camera on a scientific drone off the coast of Mossel Bay in the Republic of South Africa recorded a scene that forced marine biologists to rethink their ideas about the food hierarchy. An adult male killer whale nicknamed Starboard surfaced. His dorsal fin was broken and bent to the right. He was confronted by a great white shark.

The clash lasted less than 120 seconds. The male, weighing 6 tonnes, approached from the side, grabbed the shark by its pectoral fin, and flipped it belly-up. The shark instantly fell into a state of tonic immobility, or deep paralysis. The killer whale then opened the shark's abdominal cavity in the area of the pectoral girdle and extracted its liver, which weighed tens of kilograms and was rich in fats and squalene. The predator left the rest of the carcass to the current, which carried it to the seabed.

Strength and Abilities of Killer Whales

• The bite force of an adult killer whale exceeds 19,000 pounds per square inch. This is nearly five times stronger than the bite of a great white shark and 19 times stronger than the jaws of an African lion.
• Adults reach nearly 10 m in length and speeds of up to 56 km/h.
• Killer whales coordinate their attacks in more sophisticated ways than wolf packs on land.
• In the ocean, no prey is out of their reach. They tear apart blue whales 30 m long, drown sperm whales, and kill adult moose that swim across the cold fjords of North America.

Zero Cases in the Entire History of Observations

Throughout the entire history of seafaring and scientific observation of wild animals, not a single case has been recorded of an orca killing a human. No swimmer is known to have been eaten, no diver is known to have been torn apart, and no surfer is known to have died in the open ocean.

This raises the question: why does the most technologically sophisticated predator on the planet pose no threat to humans in the wild? According to research, the answer lies in the animal's sensory capabilities, the structure of its culture, and the architecture of its brain.

Simply place the same predator in a concrete pool at an aquarium, and this rule stops working. The orca becomes an aggressive predator toward humans.

Antarctica, 1911

On January 5, 1911, Robert Scott's British expedition aboard the ship Terra Nova landed at the edge of the fast ice in McMurdo Sound. The expedition's official photographer, Herbert Ponting, noticed a pod of eight killer whales patrolling the edge of the water.

The predators noticed two tethered sled dogs on the ice, along with Ponting and his heavy camera on a tripod. The killer whales dove beneath the ice sheet. Within seconds, the ice nearly a meter thick beneath the photographer's feet cracked. Eight multi-ton bodies struck from below, using a coordinated hydraulic wave tactic. Antarctic killer whales use this technique to wash Weddell seals into the water.

Ponting found himself cut off on a small ice floe. Heads with conical teeth up to 10 cm long rose from the water around him. Robert Scott, watching the scene from the deck, wrote in his diary that the predators rested their snouts on the edge of the floe and studied the man from a distance of one meter. A single light push would have been enough for the killer whales to send the photographer into the water.

However, the pod synchronously moved into deeper water and stopped the attack. The animals did not touch either the man or the dogs, which were whimpering on a neighboring floe. According to members of the expedition, the predators realized that in front of them was neither a seal nor a penguin.

Why Selectivity Is Not Explained by Satiety

The orca is a warm-blooded animal with a high metabolism. To maintain its body temperature in icy water, it needs between 150,000 and 250,000 kilocalories per day. Large predators, from the tiger shark to the polar bear and the saltwater crocodile, follow a simple energy-conservation rule when they encounter a defenseless human: if the prey is slow and accessible, it should be eaten.

In the case of a human, the orca's hunting algorithm works differently. It issues the command to stop even when its jaws have already closed on human flesh.

California, 1972

On September 9, 1972, off the rocky coast of California, near Point Sur south of Monterey Bay, 18-year-old surfer Hans Kretschmer was riding his board among the brown kelp beds. The area was teeming with California sea lions.

Suddenly, a six-meter killer whale burst up from the depths beneath his board. Its jaws closed on the young man's left thigh and knee. Its teeth pierced the wetsuit and soft tissue and stopped a few millimeters from the femoral artery. To save his leg, doctors had to place 100 surgical stitches.

The orca did not drag its victim to the bottom or shake him, tearing his body apart. It instantly released its grip, let the surfer go, and swam off into the ocean. This incident remains the only documented bite on a human by a wild killer whale in the history of medicine and biology.

Why the Predator Did Not Mistake a Human for Prey

A great white shark in murky coastal water relies on vision and electroreception. The ampullae of Lorenzini on its snout pick up the weak bioelectric fields of a beating heart. From below, the silhouette of a person on a surfboard is indistinguishable from that of a plump seal. The shark cannot feel an unfamiliar object with its hands, so it carries out an investigative bite. For a human, a bite from jaws with triangular serrated teeth is almost always fatal because of rapid blood loss.

Killer whales are built differently. In the forehead lies the melon, a fatty lens that works as a directional ultrasound emitter. The animal sends series of clicks into the water at frequencies up to 120,000 Hz. The reflected signal is received by the fat cavity in the lower jaw and transmitted to the inner ear and the auditory cortex of the brain.

Murky water and darkness do not hinder the killer whale. Its biosonar sees through tissue, much like ultrasound diagnostics. At a distance of hundreds of meters, the animal determines bone density, the volume of air in the lungs, the activity of the heart, and the absence of subcutaneous fat. Fat is the key sign of prey for killer whales.

In the case of Hans Kretschmer, dense seaweed and air bubbles in the surf created acoustic interference. When the teeth and tongue receptors touched neoprene and lean human muscle, the predator's brain corrected the error.

Cultural Dietary Tyranny

Orcas, which digest sperm whale blubber and penguin feathers, refuse to eat human flesh. According to specialists at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the reason is linked to a phenomenon they call cultural dietary tyranny.

Orcas are divided into dozens of isolated ecotypes. They do not interbreed or communicate with one another for hundreds of thousands of years, even when they live in the same bay. Two main ecotypes inhabit the northeastern Pacific coast:

The dietary conservatism of resident orcas is absolute. When Chinook salmon stocks in Puget Sound sharply declined, the orcas began dying of starvation. They swam among thousands of fatty herring, cod, and halibut but refused to eat them.

Food for an orca is a cultural tradition. The eldest female matriarch passes it on to her children and grandchildren through decades of learning. Humans are not on this menu.

Attacks on Yachts off Gibraltar

Since May 2020, a group of orcas has been attacking sailing vessels in the Strait of Gibraltar and off the coast of the Iberian Peninsula. In the first five years, researchers with the Atlantic Orca Working Group recorded more than 700 deliberate attacks on yachts. At least seven vessels sank.

Predators weighing several tons ram hulls at full speed, damage rudder blades, and leave crews drifting in open sea.

On May 12, 2024, the 15-meter yacht Albaran Konyak was crossing the Strait of Gibraltar 14 nautical miles from Cape Spartel. At 9:00 a.m., the hull shuddered from a series of impacts from below. The two-person crew saw the shadows of several orcas from the Iberian subpopulation. Scientists later catalogued one of them under the name Gladys.

The orcas ignored the sides and keel and delivered targeted blows only to the rudder blade. Within minutes, the steering was destroyed, a breach formed in the hull, and icy Atlantic water poured into the cabin. The sailors sent a distress signal and transferred to an inflatable raft minutes before the yacht sank.

Any of the orcas could have punctured the raft's buoyancy tube. However, once the yacht lost way, the animals lost interest in what was happening. They swam past the raft without looking at the people and disappeared.

This incident, and hundreds of others off Gibraltar, disproved a version popular in the press that the animals were taking revenge for injuries from fishing nets or collisions with ships. The marine biologists of the working group reached a different conclusion. In their view, the breaking of rudders is not aggression toward humans but a teenage game. Young animals picked it up from one another as a cultural fad. The animals enjoy the vibration of the rudder blade in the water flow from the propeller and the moment when a large object stops. Researchers believe this confirms the orcas' ability to distinguish an inanimate mechanism from living beings on board.

Aquariums and Deaths in Captivity

There is a place where the containment mechanism for orcas fails.

On February 24, 2010, the afternoon show ended at the SeaWorld aquarium in the American city of Orlando. It featured 40-year-old Dawn Brancheau, one of the park's most experienced senior trainers. She was lying on a shallow stone platform at the edge of the pool, stroking the head of a 6-ton male named Tilikum. Tilikum had been captured off the coast of Iceland in 1983.

Suddenly, in front of dozens of spectators, Tilikum grabbed the trainer by her ponytail and dragged her underwater. For the next half hour the predator drowned and mutilated her. According to the official forensic report of Orange County, the orca broke bones, tore ligaments, and fought off rescuers' attempts to approach with nets. The woman died.

The orca did not try to eat the person. Its behavior resembles neither hunting nor a random mistake.

For Tilikum, this was already the third human killing:

• 1991, Sealand of the Pacific park in Canada: together with two females, he drowned 20-year-old student trainer Keltie Byrne.
• 1999: the mutilated body of 27-year-old Daniel Dukes was found on Tilikum's back. Dukes had stayed in the park after closing and entered the water at night.

The fourth victim of captivity was 29-year-old Spanish trainer Alexis Martínez. In December 2009, on the island of Tenerife, he was fatally rammed underwater by a male nicknamed Keto, who had been born in captivity. The result: four deaths from orca attacks over several decades in concrete tanks, and not a single one in thousands of years in the world's ocean.

Устройство мозга косатки

In 2004, a team led by neurobiologist Lori Marino of Emory University conducted a detailed scan of an adult orca's brain. The brain weighs 5.5 to 7 kg, which is more than four times the mass of a human brain.

The main feature was not the mass but the architecture:

• The cerebral cortex of the orca has the highest degree of folding of any living creature, including humans.
• A large paralimbic lobe was found in the brain structure. Humans do not have it in such a developed form. In neuroscience, this area is responsible for processing complex emotions, social self-awareness, and understanding the boundaries of one's own personality.
• The cortex contains a high concentration of spindle neurons, or von Economo neurons. For a long time, they were believed to exist only in humans and great apes. These cells are associated with empathy, intuition, guilt, and the capacity for compassion. Orcas have proportionally more of them than humans do.

Wild orcas remain connected to their mother and family for their entire lives. Sons do not leave their mother's pod. The loss of a calf causes females prolonged depression. For weeks, they push the dead calf's body along the surface of the water and refuse to let it go.

An animal that swims up to 150 km a day in continuous acoustic dialogue with its family is placed in a small concrete tank. Echolocation in a pool becomes a source of suffering. An ultrasonic pulse bounces off smooth walls and returns as an echo from all directions at once. Orcas separated from their mothers and housed with unrelated ecotypes that speak different dialects develop chronic psychosis.

The death of Dawn Brancheau and other deaths in captivity are, according to researchers, not an expression of a natural hunting instinct. They are the breakdown of an isolated animal that, in a confined space, unleashes accumulated rage on the only living object available.

Twofold Bay: A Partnership Between Humans and Killer Whales

In the wild, the same brain allows killer whales to build relationships with humans that are impossible in captivity. The most famous example is linked to Twofold Bay on the southeast coast of Australia, near the town of Eden.

From the 1840s until 1930, a local pod of wild killer whales led by a seven-meter male nicknamed Old Tom hunted cooperatively with the whalers of the Davidson family. For almost 100 years, animals and humans hunted together.

When the pod spotted migrating humpback or southern right whales in the strait, some of the killer whales would surround the prey and keep it from escaping into deep water. Old Tom would swim to the wooden pier of the whaling station and beat his tail against the water with all his might, sending up columns of spray. On hearing the signal, the harpooners would climb into the rowing whaleboats. The killer whale swam ahead of the boats and showed the course to the site of the chase. Sometimes it took a Manila rope in its teeth and towed the boat against a strong current.

Between humans and killer whales there operated an unspoken agreement, which Australian sailors called the "law of the tongue." After the whalers struck a whale with a harpoon, the carcass was left at anchor in the water for a day. The killer whales ate only the lips and tongue of the dead animal. Tons of whale oil and baleen went to the people.

Over decades of joint work, the whaleboats overturned more than once, and people found themselves in the water among the killer whales. Not a single person received so much as a scratch. Archival accounts from Eden residents record cases in which Old Tom's killer whales formed a tight ring around sailors who had fallen into the water and drove off sharks attracted by the blood until the boat arrived.

Old Tom's skeleton is kept in the Eden town museum as evidence of this partnership, which is unique in history.

Four Factors Behind the Refusal to Attack

Killer whales' refusal to attack humans in the wild, according to research, is the result of four evolutionary factors coinciding:

1. Sonar instantly recognizes in a human a lean creature with no fat reserves and does not make the mistake of taking it for a seal.
2. Matriarchal culture forbids the predator from trying food that is not on the menu of its clan.
3. Brain with a developed paralimbic system identifies in a human not prey but a thinking observer and a potential partner.
4. Social bonds sustain the transmission of these rules between generations.

This balance depends on the preservation of killer whale culture. Humans deplete their food supply in the Pacific Ocean, fill the Arctic waters with the noise of propellers, and test the patience of animals in the narrow straits of the Atlantic.

Scientists note: if, under conditions of hunger or aggression from fishermen, a single authoritative matriarch female changes the age-old rule, the new behavioral experience will quickly spread throughout the entire pod.

Each time a person dives into the dark ocean water beside a ten-meter black-and-white shadow, their safety depends on the fact that the planet's most perfect predator still chooses not to resort to violence.