Researchers have identified a fascinating behavior in killer whales, aka orcas: they sometimes offer to share their prey with humans. And while the orcas haven't gone on the record to confirm it, it's likely their way of building relationships with us.
That's from a study which looked at 34 documented incidents of killer whales offering food to humans over the past two decades from around the world. What's interesting is that in nearly every case the team examined, the whales waited to observe the humans' response before recovering or abandoning the food they'd offered up – like fish, mammals, invertebrates, and seaweed. That suggest that these whales were interested in people's reactions.
This makes orcas one of the few species of wild predators on Earth that have been recorded offering food to people. It's also worth noting these incidents weren't recorded from a single pod of orcas, but from whales in oceans around California, New Zealand, Patagonia, and Norway – meaning there's something about killer whales' intellect that spurs them to try relating to humans.
In the clip of one of these incidents viewable below, you can see the whales offering up a bird. According to the researchers, an ancient murrelet had been killed by whales and left floating in the water. It was collected by people and after inspection was returned to the water where it was then retrieved by a whale who offered it back to them alongside its brother.
The team includes British Columbia, Canada-based marine biology researcher Jared Towers, who co-authored the paper on this reserach that appeared in the Journal of Comparative Psychology last week. In looking at nearly three dozen cases where the whales approached people both in the water, on boats, and on the shore, the research team concluded that the orcas are "likely prosocial representations of orcas practicing learned cultural behavior while engaging in interspecies exploration."
This made sense to the researchers, as they noted that the whales already share food as a way to build relationships with others in their species. "Offering items to humans could simultaneously include opportunities for killer whales to practice learned cultural behavior, explore, or play and in so doing learn about, manipulate, or develop relationships with us," they noted. "Given the advanced cognitive abilities and social, cooperative nature of this species, we assume that any or all these explanations for, and outcomes of such behavior are possible."
We seem to be in the midst of a range of discoveries about this fascinating creature. Just last month, we learned that killer whales make and use tools for a sort of beauty regimen; we also recently understood why they were ramming luxury yachts in Europe, and found that they'd worked out how to hunt down the largest sharks in the world.