by When researcher Jared Towers put his cameras under water to watch a few killer whales, he saw something strange.
One of the orcas, a youthful woman, “approached a camera that I had in the water to film her younger brother, and then opened her mouth and pushed out a dead sea bird,” Tobe, the Executive Director of Bay Cetology, a Canadian team of Marine Biology, who in Alert Bay, British Columbia, opposite CNN.
She closed her mouth, paused and apparently observed the reaction of the towers and hung in the water while the dead sea bird hovered over her. Then, after a few seconds, she rolled around the camera and swallowed the bird again.
A few years later, towers saw another young killer whale with the same behavior – this time the Orca showed “a freshly killed port seal right next to my boat”.
Towers discussed these incidents with his colleagues around the world and found that they too were given by killer whales.
When he collected the cases, he found 34 cases of killer whales who presented people with food between 2004 and 2024.
He and his colleagues determined their findings in a paper recently published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, in which they try to struggle for the reasons why killer whales could do this.
Perhaps you have recorded the hypothesis, the killer whales are curious and research how people react to a gift. Perhaps they play, even though they largely reduce this theory, because whales of all ages and not just young people, provided food. Or maybe it is something more scary – killer whales are known to use prey to attract other types and then kill them, but there are no records that Orcas ever kills people on the wild.
“I don’t think it is easy to provide for this behavior because there are underlying mechanisms and immediate causes,” said Towers.
“The main mechanism is simple that you can afford to offer us food, and the main cause can be that you do this to explore more about us and then learn.”
In total, except for one of the documented cases, the killer whales initially waited for people’s response before most of them removed the food, although some had simply given up and some even tried to give it again.
People ignored the food almost all the time; They only took it four times and in three of these cases they then threw it back into the water.
Researchers said there are many reasons why Orcas bring people to eat. – Ingrid N. Visser/Orca Research Trust
Pets bring your owners gifts – think of the dead mice or birds that leave cats in front of the door – and animals were observed that gave gifts with each other. So far there have been hardly any recorded cases of wild predators who gave people gifts, apart from a few cases of false killer whales – a kind of dolphin and leopard seal that offer people food.
“In a way, it is not surprising, because … everyone who is on the water with (killer whales) has experienced how curious and curious he has interactions in which you know that something goes between us and you.”
Killer whales are one of the most intelligent animals; According to the study, only people have a larger brain in terms of their height. And they kill much larger animals in relation to their own height than other whales and dolphins, which means that they can have more food to share them.
It is also assumed that you have spindle neurons in your brain – a kind of neuron that is known that you are associated with empathy, said Philippa brakes, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Exeter who specializes in whales and dolphins that were not involved in the study.
While she added that the determination of motivation is difficult “because we cannot interview her”, she suggested that it could be “altruistic” or just a “basic biological function” that “imitates something that could do a young person”.
The researchers found that it didn’t matter where the whale was in the world or whether it was male or female, a calf, a teenager or adult – they all showed this behavior.
It fits into a wider pattern of killer whales that often initiate interactions with people and boats and offer further insights into their lives.
And Towers hopes that it serves as a memory that “our species is obviously technologically advanced than anyone else on the planet, but share them with other highly developed species, the welfare of which must be taken into account in our actions.”
Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series that is committed to the environmental challenges for our planet together with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has teamed up with CNN to sharpen consciousness and education in relation to important sustainability problems and inspire positive measures.
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