> There's evidence to suggest that orcas use tonic immobility to prey on sharks.
> In 1997, an Orca in the Farallon Islands was seen holding a White Shark upside down for 15 minutes. Whether intentional or not, the Orca likely caused the shark to enter tonic immobility. Defenceless, the shark, suffocated. This also happened again in 2000.
> In New Zealand, Orcas also seem to use tonic immobility to hunt stingrays. Before attacking the orcas will turn themselves upside down. Then, holding the stingray in their mouth, they'll quickly right themselves. Flipping their prey upside down.
> Predatory behavior and top-down effects in marine ecosystems are well-described, however, intraguild interactions among co-occurring marine top predators remain less understood, but can have far reaching ecological implications. Killer whales and white sharks are prominent upper trophic level predators with highly-overlapping niches, yet their ecological interactions and subsequent effects have remained obscure. Using long-term electronic tagging and survey data we reveal rare and cryptic interactions between these predators at a shared foraging site, Southeast Farallon Island (SEFI). In multiple instances, brief visits from killer whales displaced white sharks from SEFI, disrupting shark feeding behavior for extended periods at this aggregation site. As a result, annual predations of pinnipeds by white sharks at SEFI were negatively correlated with close encounters with killer whales. Tagged white sharks relocated to other aggregation sites, creating detectable increases in white shark density at Ano Nuevo Island. This work highlights the importance of risk effects and intraguild relationships among top ocean predators and the value of long-term data sets revealing these consequential, albeit infrequent, ecological interactions.
I only skimmed it, but it doesn't seem that they looked directly at whether the sharks actually fear Orcas per se. It is already known that white sharks flee whenever one of their own is killed by anything, which they can smell from some distance away. They remember to avoid that area for some time afterwards.
"Great White Sharks are terrified of Orcas" suggests a higher level of intelligence than "Great White Sharks evolved to fear anything that can kill a Great White Shark".
It seems that the study is less concerned with that mechanism and more with the fact that this kind of displacement leads to White Sharks occupying sub-optimal hunting grounds while Orcas get to go wherever they want.
Orcas have the advantage of a mammalian brain. It's pretty crazy to think that an animal similar to a pig returned to the ocean and now dominates the environment
An adult Orca alone already significantly outclasses a Great White. A large adult Great White might weigh up to 1,110 kg (2,450 lb) while a large adult Orca can weigh up to 5,380 kg (11,860 lb). Orcas can reach speeds of over 48 km's per hour, while a Great White Shark manage up to 24 km per hour. The Orca's spine and tail also allow it to pull manoeuvres (sudden dive, climb) that a shark can't respond to. And that's before you even consider the Orca's brain...
Also, they weigh ~6 tons vs a great white at around 2.3 tons. And 4 inch teeth vs 2 inch teeth. And hunt in packs versus loners. Lastly, much faster...30mph vs 15mph.
Uff. It is not even a contest: Orcas have the second biggest brains (after Sperm Whales) with a weight of 6-7 kg. White Sharks have a brain of 35 grams. 200 times less!
I thought air (23%) also has more oxygen than water (1%), so Orcas have a big advantage in endurance here, but googling it water is much more dense than air and has more oxygen counted as mass. My guess is, that oxygen is more accessible with breathing air in lungs than with having gills?
So what can we conclude? Super smart, organized and no love for other mammals. I am amazed they only seem to go after humans in the sea world type scenario (film: Blackfish, shows the madness it induces in such animals). I don’t know of any attacks on surfers. Which seems odd. They would be so scary to swim near.
Orcas are certainly the bullies of the ocean, but they seem to exhibit complex behavior when it comes to their relationship with other mammals. For example, after capturing, "playing" with, and eating baby seals, an orca carries one seal back to shore and sets it free. It's odd behavior.
> In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, orcas near Eden, Australia, would drive humpback whales into an area known as Twofold Bay in exchange for their favorite pieces of meat—the tongue and the lips. This working relationship where the killer whales worked as whale killers for more than a hundred years was referred to by local fishermen as “the law of the tongue.”
Meta: I can't bear watching this video, I find it infuriating. It's a mix of many shots, with no temporal continuity. I don't think there is a continuous shot of more than 3 seconds. The music is annoying (wouldn't natural noise be much more impressive) and over the top. The attack scene is not even clear because of all this. And most of the time is spent watching someone boasting that her "scientific" film is marvelous.
I don't have TV at home, and I rarely watch youtube and modern videos, so I suppose I'm just not used to way TV is nowadays. Even the BBC. I hope it doesn't help inducing ADHD.
At the end of that clip, she gets so excited about seeing something that "no one had seen before", yet at the beginning, she talks about them hoping to see this because of reports of it happening. Huh? Contradict yourself much? I hate these overly dramatic reality type documentaries. Otherwise, some great footage, and could have been so much better without the overly produced interview.
Entirely informal, but I went through reports of 100 years of killer whale/human interactions in the news in British Columbia/Canada (home of 3 different varieties of killer whales) - and there's three cases of humans attacked, and all cases were provoked.
Wow interesting. There seems to be more and more evidence that orcas, dolphins, and octopuses are very intelligent.
I wonder if one of them would achieve human-like intelligence if they evolved for a billion more years. I would bet on it.
And then they would probably multiply without control, and kill off all their competitors.
On land, humans have done that. Although elephants are very intelligent, we're the smarter than them and outnumber them and all other animals by a large margin. We live on nearly every part of the earth.
It would be interesting/weird if the sea filled up with one large, intelligent animal that lived everywhere.
Most of shark attacks on surfers are mistakes, so perhaps orcas are just smarter and see better, and can make a distinction between seals and humans on boards? But then again I've heard about orcas sinking sailing boats and trying to attack polar explorers by breaking the ice below them, so it's not like they're completely uninterested in attacking humans. It probably depends how much contact with humans they have. Being predators, it's only logical that they will eat anything they can catch when the hunger strikes...
Super smart, organized and no love for other mammals.
Depends on the population: The 'resident' (in contrast to 'transient') orcas in the Pacific Northwest do not eat mammals, even though it would be to their benefit as salmon is getting sparse...
It’s a myth that they never attack humans in the wild. As with most shark attacks it seems to be a case of mistaken identity. Since orcas are significantly more intelligent though they usually retreat before any real harm is done.
The Blue Planet making of video showed that the Orcas filmed trying to knock the seals off the ice flow seemingly attempted the same "trick" on the humans on the small boat filming them. While it is remarkable that we don't seem to have evidence of orcas attacking humans, this making of video seemed to suggest to me that they were at least thinking about it.
I recently listened to the audiobook "Beyond Words" by Carl Safina, I believe on the recommendation of an HN comment.
If you're interested in the intelligence, empathy, and minds of animals, I can heartily recommend this book. The last third or so of the book covered Orcas (and some whales and dolphins) and it was pretty amazing.
I particularly liked that he covered some of the stories that are not quite scientific in nature, while calling them out as such. The book will definitely leave you with the lingering feeling that minds and awareness are not quite as simple and clear cut as we might believe them to be.
Consensus is that they were likely outcompeted by whales for sure, though mostly by relatives of modern sperm whales. I hadn't heard anything about predation by dolphins/orcas.
> Kent, a Canadian Game & Fisheries warden, tells the story of one hapless grizzly attempting to swim a channel. The distance was, perhaps, less than a mile. Mr. Bear was beavering away at the swim. Up the channel, the dorsal fins of a small pod of orcas sliced the water--two bulls, some females, and get. The whales spotted the bear first. The moms and pups held back, while the bulls circled in. The bear weighed his options. First he looked to the farshore and then he looked to the backshore. He rubbernecked back and forth. Realizing both were too far, he tried to paddle straight up like a missile coming out of a nuclear sub. The whales did not circle (after all, they're not sharks) and did not sprint. They simply swam for the grizzly. In seconds, Mr. Bear turned into a red oil slick.
Looks like the length of an orca and great white are exactly the same. I would have thought the orca to be much larger. Couldn't the great white turn the tables here?
I have been SCUBA and free diving many times and seen sharks, and it is a thrill, but no fear.
As I have written on HN before, once when I was 10 miles offshore in a small Columbia 22 sailboat and Orca (killer whale) jumped four times high out of the water landing right next to my boat, violently rocking it. Yes, I felt fear.
> that is, if there isn’t a remnant population of megalodon hidden somewhere in the deep
I hate this kind of statement so much. Megalodon would be hunting in warm shallow water areas close to the coast. And they are defiantly not 'hidden somewhere in the deep'.
If Megalodon existed, whales could not have grown as large as they did.
> "adult megalodon were not abundant in shallow water environments, and mostly inhabited offshore areas.[1]"
They're also thought to have died out 3.6 million years ago. There's no suggestion that a descendant is still alive, but that's plenty of time for such a lineage to evolve to specialize in deepwater environments.
I honestly thought the author was making a Hannibal Lector joke at first, which I thought was a bit morbid, until the next paragraph, where he expanded on the Orca's taste for shark livers. Turns out it's nature that's the morbid one. Wow. No wonder sharks scatter!
Isn't it a standard pattern of when somebody who is bullying others constantly is very bad at dealing with a bigger bully because they don't have much experience with somebody standing up to them successfully?
A good book on great whites and the Farallon Islands is The Devil's Teeth. It covers the islands, the birds, seals and great whites but there's very little in it on orcas if I remember correctly.
[+] [-] kendallpark|6 years ago|reply
> In 1997, an Orca in the Farallon Islands was seen holding a White Shark upside down for 15 minutes. Whether intentional or not, the Orca likely caused the shark to enter tonic immobility. Defenceless, the shark, suffocated. This also happened again in 2000.
> In New Zealand, Orcas also seem to use tonic immobility to hunt stingrays. Before attacking the orcas will turn themselves upside down. Then, holding the stingray in their mouth, they'll quickly right themselves. Flipping their prey upside down.
https://www.sharktrust.org/tonic-immobility
[+] [-] avip|6 years ago|reply
IANAO, but it works on herons and pelicans.
[+] [-] edoo|6 years ago|reply
All apex predator younglings are easy game until they are adults.
[+] [-] EndXA|6 years ago|reply
Abstract:
> Predatory behavior and top-down effects in marine ecosystems are well-described, however, intraguild interactions among co-occurring marine top predators remain less understood, but can have far reaching ecological implications. Killer whales and white sharks are prominent upper trophic level predators with highly-overlapping niches, yet their ecological interactions and subsequent effects have remained obscure. Using long-term electronic tagging and survey data we reveal rare and cryptic interactions between these predators at a shared foraging site, Southeast Farallon Island (SEFI). In multiple instances, brief visits from killer whales displaced white sharks from SEFI, disrupting shark feeding behavior for extended periods at this aggregation site. As a result, annual predations of pinnipeds by white sharks at SEFI were negatively correlated with close encounters with killer whales. Tagged white sharks relocated to other aggregation sites, creating detectable increases in white shark density at Ano Nuevo Island. This work highlights the importance of risk effects and intraguild relationships among top ocean predators and the value of long-term data sets revealing these consequential, albeit infrequent, ecological interactions.
[+] [-] robert_tweed|6 years ago|reply
"Great White Sharks are terrified of Orcas" suggests a higher level of intelligence than "Great White Sharks evolved to fear anything that can kill a Great White Shark".
It seems that the study is less concerned with that mechanism and more with the fact that this kind of displacement leads to White Sharks occupying sub-optimal hunting grounds while Orcas get to go wherever they want.
[+] [-] kuprel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harryf|6 years ago|reply
And it seems Orca's may have figured out a sharks big weakness... tonic immobility - https://www.sharktrust.org/tonic-immobility
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/01/63/62/17251480/15/rawImage....
[+] [-] ralfd|6 years ago|reply
https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-very-primitive-brain-like-in...
I thought air (23%) also has more oxygen than water (1%), so Orcas have a big advantage in endurance here, but googling it water is much more dense than air and has more oxygen counted as mass. My guess is, that oxygen is more accessible with breathing air in lungs than with having gills?
[+] [-] cushychicken|6 years ago|reply
(Legitimately curious. Rereading before posting makes me realize that I sound like an anti-evolution troll XD )
[+] [-] njharman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Intermernet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mobilemidget|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tistel|6 years ago|reply
So what can we conclude? Super smart, organized and no love for other mammals. I am amazed they only seem to go after humans in the sea world type scenario (film: Blackfish, shows the madness it induces in such animals). I don’t know of any attacks on surfers. Which seems odd. They would be so scary to swim near.
[+] [-] kendallpark|6 years ago|reply
Orcas are certainly the bullies of the ocean, but they seem to exhibit complex behavior when it comes to their relationship with other mammals. For example, after capturing, "playing" with, and eating baby seals, an orca carries one seal back to shore and sets it free. It's odd behavior.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWsN63PRCW8
There are also cases of orcas saving humans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1ZkkHesyjg
> In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, orcas near Eden, Australia, would drive humpback whales into an area known as Twofold Bay in exchange for their favorite pieces of meat—the tongue and the lips. This working relationship where the killer whales worked as whale killers for more than a hundred years was referred to by local fishermen as “the law of the tongue.”
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/blog/killer-whale-avoids-eat...
[+] [-] idoubtit|6 years ago|reply
I don't have TV at home, and I rarely watch youtube and modern videos, so I suppose I'm just not used to way TV is nowadays. Even the BBC. I hope it doesn't help inducing ADHD.
[+] [-] huffmsa|6 years ago|reply
There are lots of recorded cases of them helping humans though
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_S...
[+] [-] dylan604|6 years ago|reply
At the end of that clip, she gets so excited about seeing something that "no one had seen before", yet at the beginning, she talks about them hoping to see this because of reports of it happening. Huh? Contradict yourself much? I hate these overly dramatic reality type documentaries. Otherwise, some great footage, and could have been so much better without the overly produced interview.
[+] [-] teunispeters|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chubot|6 years ago|reply
I wonder if one of them would achieve human-like intelligence if they evolved for a billion more years. I would bet on it.
And then they would probably multiply without control, and kill off all their competitors.
On land, humans have done that. Although elephants are very intelligent, we're the smarter than them and outnumber them and all other animals by a large margin. We live on nearly every part of the earth.
It would be interesting/weird if the sea filled up with one large, intelligent animal that lived everywhere.
[+] [-] ivanhoe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cygx|6 years ago|reply
Depends on the population: The 'resident' (in contrast to 'transient') orcas in the Pacific Northwest do not eat mammals, even though it would be to their benefit as salmon is getting sparse...
[+] [-] golover721|6 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale_attack
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phreenet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abrowne|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daveFNbuck|6 years ago|reply
It's not just humans that they don't attack. Orcas have cultural food preferences and tend to hunt only the prey that they grew up eating.
[+] [-] DailyHN|6 years ago|reply
That could be because surfers tend to be in much shallower water.
[+] [-] maxerickson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krsdcbl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jger15|6 years ago|reply
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28218-zoologger-the-o...
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|6 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how deep the analogy goes but a falconer told me that they "hunt like wolves".
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasuki|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daedalus_j|6 years ago|reply
If you're interested in the intelligence, empathy, and minds of animals, I can heartily recommend this book. The last third or so of the book covered Orcas (and some whales and dolphins) and it was pretty amazing. I particularly liked that he covered some of the stories that are not quite scientific in nature, while calling them out as such. The book will definitely leave you with the lingering feeling that minds and awareness are not quite as simple and clear cut as we might believe them to be.
[+] [-] shoo|6 years ago|reply
Peter Watts & Laurie Channer "Bulk Food": http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/WattsChanner_Bulk_Food.pd...
[+] [-] protomyth|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajross|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cossatot|6 years ago|reply
Robert H. Miller, Kayaking the Inside Passage.
[+] [-] proee|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] point78|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|6 years ago|reply
I have been SCUBA and free diving many times and seen sharks, and it is a thrill, but no fear.
As I have written on HN before, once when I was 10 miles offshore in a small Columbia 22 sailboat and Orca (killer whale) jumped four times high out of the water landing right next to my boat, violently rocking it. Yes, I felt fear.
[+] [-] nickik|6 years ago|reply
I hate this kind of statement so much. Megalodon would be hunting in warm shallow water areas close to the coast. And they are defiantly not 'hidden somewhere in the deep'.
If Megalodon existed, whales could not have grown as large as they did.
[+] [-] avar|6 years ago|reply
> "adult megalodon were not abundant in shallow water environments, and mostly inhabited offshore areas.[1]"
They're also thought to have died out 3.6 million years ago. There's no suggestion that a descendant is still alive, but that's plenty of time for such a lineage to evolve to specialize in deepwater environments.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalodon#Paleobiology
[+] [-] russellbeattie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmilcin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalChris|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pgt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|6 years ago|reply
Killer whales are apex predators, as no animal preys on them.
So what exactly is new in this paper?