Have you ever considered sharing your lunch with an orca? Because a new study suggests they thought about sharing their meals with you.
The study, published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, identifies 34 cases in which orcas attempted to share their prey with humans either in boats, in the water, or on shore.
“There appears to be a prosocial element to these cases, indicative of interspecific generalized reciprocity, which is extremely unusual to witness in any non-human animal, and is suggestive of evolutionary convergence between orcas and people,” said lead study author Jared Towers in a press release from Bay Cetology.
Killer Whales Sharing Their Prey
Orca with stingray (Left Image Courtesy of Lucia Corral, Right Image Courtesy of Leonardo Gonzalez)
According to the study, in 97 percent of the observations, as the orcas approached the humans, they dropped the presented prey and waited for the humans to respond. Afterwards, the orcas would retrieve the prey and either leave, share the meal with a different whale, or return later with it.
In only four cases did people accept the meal. In one of those four cases, after a researcher examined the food and then placed it back in the water for the whale, the orca tried to give the meal back to the human.
“Orcas are apex predators that often eat other large mammals, but when it comes to people, they occasionally prefer to share, indicating their interest in building relationships outside their own species,” said third study author Vanessa Prigollni in a press release.
Killer Whale Interactions
Orcas with penguin (Image Courtesy of Jared Towers)
The authors recounted their own experiences when wild orcas offered them food, for this study, and then also interviewed others in the field about their experiences. The 34 encounters took place over a 20-year period and spanned across six populations of orcas in four different oceans.
These populations included: The Punta Norte Patagonia population near central Argentina in the Western South Atlantic, the Pelagic and Coastal orca populations around New Zealand in the South Pacific, the West Coast Transient and Gulf of Alaska Bigg’s populations in the North Pacific and the orca populations off the coast of Norway in the North Atlantic.
In these instances, the orcas presented humans with either freshly-caught fish, mammals, or sometimes invertebrates. The prey were often deceased, except in a few cases, including when an orca offered someone an injured broadnose sevengill shark and another orca offered someone a stingray.
“Orca[s] are very social, and we frequently see them food sharing,” said second study author Ingrid Visser in a press release. “To document and describe behaviour of them attempting to food-share with humans in various places around the globe is fascinating.”
Read More: Watch These Killer Whales Use Kelp as a Grooming Tool – A Surprising Find for Researchers
Killer Whales and Theory of Mind
With so many instances of orcas sharing food with humans, the study authors were left wondering why this was the case. According to the study, there could be several reasons.
One reason could be that killer whales often kill larger prey and may end up with more food than they need. If it’s difficult to transport, the prey may become more work than it is actually worth. They may then offer it to others, including humans.
Another reason, the study suggests, is that orcas are highly social creatures and often share food with one another, benefiting their society. They have high levels of encephalization, according to the study, meaning their brain is relative to their body size, similar to humans. It could be that orcas recognize us as intelligent creatures as well and perhaps have “theory of mind.”
“Of the many and varied minds in the sea, likely the greatest are those of orcas. Casual stories of their almost surreal intelligence abound. But here, these scientists have systematically gathered an impressive litany of instances where free-living orcas have shown that they possess ‘theory of mind,’ meaning that their minds understand that humans have minds too,” said Carl Safina, an award-winning ecologist and author who was not involved in this study, in a press release.
“Psychologists have often insisted that ‘theory of mind’ belongs only to humans. Orcas would beg to differ. Orcas have repeatedly sought to be interactive with us, and they are curious about us. After living millions of years in the sea, to them we in our boats must seem like visiting aliens. And indeed, we are strangers in a strange place we hardly know, about which we yet have almost everything to learn,” Safina concluded in the press release.
Read More: Orcas Imitate Human Speech as a Way to Communicate With Us
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
A graduate of UW-Whitewater, Monica Cull wrote for several organizations, including one that focused on bees and the natural world, before coming to Discover Magazine. Her current work also appears on her travel blog and Common State Magazine. Her love of science came from watching PBS shows as a kid with her mom and spending too much time binging Doctor Who.
