Orcas, also known as killer whales, are among the most well-studied marine mammals, captivating the public and scientists alike with their intelligence, strong social bonds and complex behaviors. Scientists recently documented critically endangered Southern Resident orcas in the Salish Sea using kelp as a grooming tool. They have also been observed wearing carcasses of salmon on their heads, either as a sign of playfulness or to eat at a later date, according to marine scientists.
And now another surprising behavior of orcas has come to light. A recently published paper documented nearly three dozen examples recorded over a 20-year period of wild orcas offering prey like dead birds, seals, and fishes to humans. The displays appear to be efforts by both male and female orcas around the world to share their food with another apex predator, possibly done out of altruism, relationship-building or for play.
Joining us to share more is Jared Towers, the lead author of the paper and executive director of Bay Cetology, a research and whale conservation organization in British Columbia.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with generous orcas, also known as killer whales. Orcas captivate the public and scientists alike with their intelligence, strong social bonds and complex behaviors. In the last year, researchers documented critically endangered Southern Resident orcas in the Salish Sea using kelp as a grooming tool. Other orcas were seen for the first time in nearly 40 years, wearing carcasses of salmon on their heads, either as signs of playfulness or to eat at a later date.
A new study shows another side of these giant marine mammals. It documented nearly three dozen examples over a 20-year period of wild orcas offering their prey to humans. Jared Towers is the lead author of the paper and the executive director of Bay Cetology, a whale research and conservation organization based in British Columbia. He joins me now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Jared Towers: Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thank you.
Miller: I understand that you were inspired to do this paper partly by your own firsthand experience. So do you mind telling us that story?
Towers: No problem. That’s true – I was in the field and doing research on killer whales, as I often do. And on two different occasions, I had killer whales approach me and seemingly offer me part of what they were eating. It left me with a lot of questions moving forward. And eventually, I talked to some other folks in different parts of the world, colleagues of mine who were also engaged with killer whale research, and similar things had happened to them. That really got me thinking about what this phenomenon could be about.
Miller: Do you remember what first went through your mind when that happened the first time?
Towers: Well, the first time, I didn’t actually realize that it happened until afterwards because I had an underwater camera and it was filming at very close range in the water below where I was standing on the vessel. It was quite choppy that day, so I couldn’t see into the water, but I knew that the killer whale had approached the vessel and was right beside us. But what that killer whale did in front of the camera was open up its mouth and let out a small sea bird called an ancient murrelet. And then it sat there looking at the camera for about five seconds before it picked it back up again and swam away. Looking at that footage, I was amazed at the interaction that this whale had instigated with me or the camera that I was holding.
Something happened a few years later where a cousin of that whale actually had a freshly killed harbor seal that was packing around. It had only just killed it. It approached the vessel and dropped it right under where my colleagues and I were standing. It was perfectly calm that day and we all stood there watching this harbor seal float slowly down, for about 20 seconds, before the whale returned, picked it up and then proceeded to eat it. I think the reaction of my colleague, Tasli, was disbelief. She said, “did that just happen,” after the whale swam away with it. And I think that summarizes what we were all feeling and thinking at the time.
Miller: When those happen, I guess the first one you weren’t aware of in the moment, the second one though, you were. I’m curious if you felt like you were in the presence of this fellow mammal that was saying, “Here, eat this thing. I got it for you.”
Towers: Yeah, it could have been a gift. It could have just been an offering to see what it was that we would do with it, to see how we would respond.
Miller: Well, that’s even more fascinating to think about. The first, a gift, is one thing, but Orca as experimenter opens up a whole new range of possibilities. I mean, there you are as a researcher, but that other possibility of what they’re doing, it puts them in the realm of researchers as well.
Towers: Yeah, I think that’s the thing that is maybe surprising to a lot of people. If you spend a lot of time with orcas, you might be less surprised. But it’s a really good example or direct evidence of their theory of mind and capacity, mental capacity, to engage in interspecific reciprocity or at least explore the opportunity for such a thing to develop. We often think of ourselves as the only creature on the planet that does such a thing. And in most circumstances, we are. It’s very rare for any wild animal to come and offer us food. But killer whales are one of those other highly evolved species which does have the capacity to just share its food with other species, just to see what they would do.
Miller: Now, am I right that you’ve been studying killer whales and other marine mammals for something like 20 years?
Towers: Yeah, that’s correct.
Miller: So if I understood you correctly, it’s that for people like you who have been studying these animals, you’re maybe less surprised to see this kind of behavior. What have you already experienced being around them that made this less surprising?
Towers: Well, I think for the most part in my research on wild killer whales, it’s very rare that they’ll come up and try and interact with me. They typically ignore me, and sometimes they’ll just do a brief interaction and carry on their way. But a lot of what we know about the minds of orcas comes from research on captive killer whales and the relationships that trainers have formed with these animals. And talking to those people or reading some of the things that they’ve written, you get this sense that killer whales are always one step ahead of the game. They like to have different kinds of relationships with different people. They’re always testing you, so we know they have the capacity to do that.
In the wild though, for them to actually approach someone and do such a thing is very rare. We documented 34 cases over 20 years, which sounds like a lot, but considering how much time my co-authors and I spend with killer whales, it’s really not that much. I’m on the water with workers over 50 days of the year, sometimes over 100 days a year. And these cases are very rare.
But in addition to all that, killer whales are like us in many ways. Their brains are very large compared to their overall body size. They’re very social, they share some of the same physiological traits, like a post-reproductive life span. They’ve evolved killing very large prey and sharing it with family members. We have similar life spans. So all these things together really tell a story about another creature on the planet that is very comparative to our own, and maybe some of the more advanced primate species and other advanced dolphin species. I think that that’s really one of the take home messages from the story, that we’re dealing with a very evolved, probably intellectual animal here.
Miller: Did any patterns emerge in those 34 cases that you were able to put together from all around the world, patterns in terms of whale demographics, age, gender or geography?
Towers: Well, surprisingly, no. At first, we thought we’d be much more likely to see this in juveniles. Those were my experiences. I had juveniles come and bring me food. But when we looked at all the cases, what we found is that sexes and age classes were more or less equally representative in all the samples. And at first, that was a bit surprising, but we thought about it, we’re like, well, maybe this shouldn’t be surprising considering killer whales are lifelong food sharers. They are given food from a young age and well into their old age, in their 60s and 70s, they’re sharing food with other related and unrelated individuals. So yeah, the behavior was very well represented right across the board …
Miller: When you say unrelated, so they’re known to share food not just with their family members, but with strangers, with orcas who they don’t know?
Towers: Well, maybe. We’re not sure in a lot of cases whether or not they’re sharing food with whales they don’t know, but they do have these large social networks and they’re definitely sharing food with whales that are not maternally related to them, so not part of their core travel group. And that does happen quite commonly in some populations.
Miller: What have you heard from fellow orca researchers since your study came out?
Towers: Well, we’ve heard that a few other orca researchers have their own stories to share. That’s maybe not surprising at this point because we do have so many cases from different parts of the world, different killer whale populations. But since the paper was published, we’ve had a few other long-time orca researchers … One shared a similar account of killer whales in Antarctica trying to share a dead penguin with them. And one from Spain [shared that] killer whales that are trying to share a bluefin tuna with people on the boat.
Miller: In any of these stories, do the humans say thank you, I will take that? I will take that penguin? All right, thanks for the bluefin tuna?
Towers: Yeah, in some cases people did accept the offering and passed it back. And in some of those cases, the killer whales swam away and then shared the food with their other killer whales that were nearby. And in other cases, they just offered it back to the person – like, no, I insist this is for you. So we had quite a range.
Miller: [Laughs] If I wanted to eat that penguin, I would have eaten it. Here, take it.
Towers: Yeah.
Miller: I loved your list of the ways in which we are similar to orcas and my guess is that it wasn’t exhaustive, that you could have even given us more important examples. I’m curious if working so close to orcas, if researching them for years, has given you a different understanding of our own species?
Towers: Yeah, that’s one of the things that I often say to people when they ask me why I do what I do and what’s the most interesting thing about it … And honestly, I learned so much more about people and how we’ve evolved just by looking at killer whales, drawing those comparisons, learning about things that I think make them very interesting and fascinating. Because those things are very relatable to who we are and what kind of species we’ve become in our time that we’ve evolved on this planet. And yeah, I think that if you have a good understanding of what killer whales are all about, then you naturally have a better understanding of what we’re all about as well.
Miller: What do you see as the biggest mysteries about killer whales that you hope to uncover or unravel?
Towers: Well, that’s a big question. There’s so many answers to it, from getting to know a little bit more about who they are, to basic biological questions that we’re addressing in the field all the time, like, what defines a population? How abundant is a population? What’s important for that population to thrive and survive? How it came to be in the situation that it is in now? You can answer a lot of historical questions with genetic data, for example.
I think that there’s a wide range of questions about these creatures that we have yet to ask. So it’s a fascinating time for orca research, because these are one of the most widely distributed creatures on the planet and they’re represented by many different populations, each with their own intricate behaviors, morphological features. So, it’s [a] really interesting species to study.
Miller: There are efforts right now to use AI to decode marine mammal language. Do you think there’s going to be a big breakthrough in terms of understanding what they’re saying to each other in your lifetime?
Towers: I certainly hope so, but I don’t think it’s that simple. I know there is a lot of research trying to understand orca languages or languages of whales in general – sperm whales, for example; killer whales is another one. But I think that we need to take those headlines with a grain of salt, because the ways in which other animals may communicate and have language can be very different from our own and beyond our ability to understand, even when we use AI to decode them.
What I think we need to start thinking about [is] the silences in between the words and what those might mean as well. There’s a lot of posturing, and that does involve silent moments for animal species and their ways of communicating. So there’s definitely advances to be made, but I think breakthroughs will come one small step at a time, as they often do in science.
Miller: Jared Towers, thanks very much.
Towers: You’re welcome.
Miller: That is Jared Towers. He is the lead author of the new paper documenting more than three dozen examples over a 20-year period of wild orcas offering their prey to humans. He is the executive director of Bay Cetology. It’s a whale research and conservation organization in British Columbia.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
