This Is Why Orcas Are Called Killer Whales

Throughout history, there has never been a creature on the entire planet more apex, more sadistical, and more feared than this one black and white dolphin. The orca, the blackfish, the wolf of the sea, or by their most accurate name, the killer whale. Now, to be clear, these orcas aren’t anywhere near close to the biggest animals in the ocean.

 Blue whales still outweigh them over 30 times over, along with tons of other whales. But there’s a massive difference between being the most heavy animal and being the most feared animal. Behind only humans, they’re the most widespread mammal on the entire planet. And ironic to their name, they don’t just kill whales. They kill sharks.

 They kill dolphins. They could kill humans if they ever felt the need to. They’re unbelievably smart, strategic, tactical, relentless. Some might even say just straight evil. There is not a singular species in the world that would ever even attempt to actively prey on an adult orca. Not great whites, not any whales, and not any massive squids.

Everyone knows the rule. You don’t get to kill the killer whale. What makes this creature able to kill all the other supposed apex predators? Why are they seemingly so capable and so aware of their capabilities, too? And why does it seem like these animals have become so intelligent that they’ve turned to killing, not for food, but for their own sick version of fun? To understand what makes these creatures so cute and simultaneously haunting, let’s first understand what an orca even is. They are killer whales. Yes, because

they kill whales, but they are also technically whales. More specifically, dolphins. While they’re nowhere near close to the largest whale out there, they are actually the largest dolphin in the entire world. The largest and the most evil. Before I jump back into the video, a brief mention from this video sponsor.

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But calling them dolphins doesn’t really do them justice. Because when you think [music] dolphin, you think of something that does back flips and clicks at Taurus. Orcas do back flips, too, but only after they’ve just drowned a humpback calf and eaten its tongue. The name whale killer stuck for a reason. Because these things hunt whales the way wolves hunt elk in packs, with strategy, and with absolutely zero mercy.

 But orcas would only be scary to whales if all they hunted was whales. Unfortunately, for everything else in the ocean, [music] it’s a lot more than that. See, orcas are found in every ocean on Earth. Arctic, Antarctic, tropical, temperate, doesn’t matter. If there’s water, there’s probably [music] an orca somewhere deciding what to kill next.

 So, what do they kill? [music] Seals, sharks, whales, we already know. Penguins, dolphins, yes, their own cousins, sea lions, stingrays, fish, squid, sea turtles, even moose if they happen to be swimming between islands in Alaska. Over 140 species have been documented as orca prey, which is a lot more than a food chain and quite frankly, a massacre.

 They’re apex predators, which means they have no natural enemies. People claim great whites are apex predators, and they would be if it wasn’t for the orca wanting to eat their liver. Nothing hunts orcas. Nothing even tries. But eating everything doesn’t really make you some sort of a sick killer monster. It just makes you hungry.

 Lots of animals are hungry. What’s unsettling is how they treat their prey before the kill. Look at this. This is a seal minding its own business. When an orca appears below it, the orca doesn’t bite. It doesn’t drown it. Instead, it swims underneath the seal, positions itself carefully, and then slaps it with its tail so hard that the seal goes flying.

Not a few feet, not 10 ft, 80 ft into the air. The seal spins through the air like a ragd doll, crashes back into the water, and if it’s still alive, which it usually isn’t, the orca does it again and again. Sometimes multiple orcas take turns like they’re playing volleyball with a corpse.

 And here’s the worst part. The seal is often already dead before the first launch. The orca killed it on the first hit. Everything after that is just for fun. This isn’t some sort of efficient hunting technique. This is just cruelty. And they’ll often even teach the young orca calves how to do the same.

 So, they’re teaching their kids to torture prey. But why waste energy on something that’s already dead? Well, cruelty in the animal kingdom is usually accidental. A cat plays with a mouse because its instincts are firing, not because it has a plan. But with orcas, the sadism appears to be an intentional educational tool. Researchers have observed adult orcas capturing a seal and then bringing it back to their calves.

 They don’t kill it. Instead, they incapacitate it, maybe by nibbling a flipper or stunning it, and then they release it. They watch as a young calf tries to coordinate its own attack. If the seal starts to get away, the adult will gently or not so gently herd it back into the training zone. The seal is used as a live training dummy.

It is subjective to hours of terror and pain. Not because the orcas are hungry, but because the adults are teaching the next generation how to be efficient killers. This is cultural transmission. Orcas aren’t just born knowing how to hunt. They are taught. Similar to how humans have to learn things, too.

 That teaching requires a live subject to practice on. It’s a level of intelligence that’s almost [music] impossible to wrap your head around. A predator that understands the concept of practice [music] and is willing to use the suffering of another species to ensure its children are successful. Orcas are one of the few species known for playing with their prey.

 But I do want to clarify this likely isn’t real sadism, at least not in the human sense. There’s no clear evidence that orcas get real pleasure out of watching their prey suffer. They just don’t really care. Yeah, it’s used for training, but it’s not that they intentionally like seeing the seal itself in pain.

 What this does show, however, is the complexity of these animals. [music] Most other creatures are kind of in biological robot mode. They do what they’re supposed to do and don’t really show much signs of critical thought. This would make sense for having the second largest brain in the entire world, though.

 Teaching other orcas how to flip seals is cool, though, but it’s not actually the best showcase of their intelligence. A few years ago in South Africa, two specific orcas, nicknamed port and starboard [music] began hunting great whites, but in a very strange way. If you flip a shark upside down, its brain essentially shortcircuits.

 It goes into a trlike state and becomes completely paralyzed. It’s a glitch in the shark’s design, and the orcas, they figured it out. The orcas will grab the shark by its fin and flip it over, holding it there until it drowns because it can’t pump water over its gills. Once the shark is paralyzed and dead, the orcas use surgical precision to rip out the shark’s liver, which is packed with calorie rich oils, and leave the rest of the carcass behind.

 They don’t even eat the whole shark. They’re foodies. They only want the [music] best part, and they have the skill to take it without breaking a sweat. After Port and Starboard showed up, the great white population in the area didn’t just decrease. They fled. They abandoned their primary hunting grounds for years. Think about that.

 A predator that had ruled an area for eons was so traumatized by two orcas that they literally gave up their home. And the liver of a great white shark is massive. It can weigh up to 500 lb in larger individuals, and it’s packed with oils, fats, and nutrients. It’s the most calorie dense organ in the shark’s body. Orcas know this, not instinctively, but because they’ve learned it.

 Because orcas have been hunting sharks for thousands of generations. And somewhere along the way, they figured out that the liver is the prize. This is anatomical knowledge. They understand the internal structure of their prey well enough to target specific organs. They know where the liver sits.

 They know how to access it without damaging it. They know that it’s worth more than anything else in the shark’s body, and they teach this to their young. In some pods, calves as young as 2 years old have been observed practicing liver extraction on smaller sharks. They don’t get it right at first. They tear too much.

 They miss the organ, but they learn. By the time they’re adults, they can perform the extraction in under a minute. This is what actually makes them terrifying. The combination of not only being strong, but cunning. Sperm whales are bigger than orcas. One tail whip would kill any great white shark instantly. Great whites don’t fear a sperm whale, though.

They avoid each other because there’s really no need for them to interact. The whales don’t really hunt or flee from the great whites either. It’s mutual ignorance because it’s a waste of energy. You’ll never see a sperm whale trying to slice out a great white’s liver. Okay, so they terrorize everything in the ocean, not just whales.

 At least if you’re on land, you’re chill. It’s the one rule of the ocean. Sea creatures stay in the sea. Well, in Patagonia, a specific pod of orcas has developed a technique that should be physically impossible for a six-tonon whale. They perform intentional stranding. They wait for the tide to come in and they watch the baby sea lions playing in the shadows.

 Then with a massive burst of speed, the orca lunges out of the water, sliding entirely onto the sand. They grab the sea lion and then using a series of powerful body wriggles, they slide back into the ocean. This is a highstakes gamble. If the orca gets stuck, it will die under its own weight. But they’ve mastered it, and they even teach their calves how to do it by practicing on the sand without actually grabbing prey.

 And then there’s the Antarctic pods. If a seal is hiding on a floating chunk of ice, the orcas don’t just wait for it to fall off. They form a line, swim side by side at high speed towards the ice, and at the last second, they dive underneath it. This creates a synchronized wave, a literal wall of water that washes over the ice and knocks a seal directly into the mouths of the other orcas waiting on the other side.

 They are using hydrodnamics as a weapon. They’re manipulating the physical environment to remove your only safe spot. Instead of just looking for other prey, they find solutions to problems. The only other animal who really does this is humans. And well, we conquered the whole earth. So, we have a predator that is global, intelligent, tactical, and capable of killing anything from a great white to a blue whale.

 A predator that can slide onto land to grab you and use waves to knock you off ice. By all accounts, humans should be on the menu. We’re slow, we’re weak, and we spend a lot of time in the water. We are essentially just skinny seals. And yet, there has never been a recorded fatal attack on a human by an orca in the wild. Think about how weird that is.

 These animals are opportunistic. They eat almost anything else. And yet, for some reason, they have made a choice not to hunt us. There are stories of orcas actually helping humans. In the early 20th century, a pod of orcas known as the killers of Eden worked with human whalers. The orcas would find humpback whales, herd them into the bay, and then alert the humans by splashing.

 The humans would kill the whale, take the blubber, and leave the tongue and lips for the orcas. It was a cross species alliance. So, why do they do this? Some scientists think it’s because we don’t fit their cultural food profile. Their mothers didn’t teach them that humans are food, so they don’t see us as food.

Others think it’s because they are smart enough to realize that hunting humans is a bad idea. They’ve seen our boats. They’ve seen our weapons. And they’ve decided that we are the only other apex predator on the planet worth respecting. Or perhaps more chillingly, they recognize us.

 They see another creature that lives in families, that communicates in languages, [music] and that kills for sport. They see a mirror of themselves, just a weird looking version. They might recognize our intelligence and classify us as smart enough to not want to eat. And honestly, I don’t know which is scarier. The idea that they don’t know what we are, or the idea that they know exactly what we are.

But this weird silent truce only exists as long as the orcer is free. Every single fatal orcer attack in history has happened in a tank. Every single one. But it’s not because these whales suddenly realized we’re made of meat. It’s because their brains, those massive hypersocial processing units, literally begin to collapse under the weight of sensory deprivation.

 Imagine having the most powerful sonar on the planet, capable of seeing a fish’s heartbeat from a football field away. And every time you use it, the sound just slams back into your face off a concrete wall. It’s acoustic torture. When you trap an animal that has real intelligence in a cage, they’re smart enough to realize they’re trapped.

 They’re not like animals in the deep sea that will hang out and collect scraps of food and stay immobile for 10 years straight. They’re emotional. They’re complex. They’re well, not human, but Orca. This is where we get cases like Telecom. He wasn’t born aggressive. He was a specialized predator that had been driven to a state of chronic captive psychosis.

 Their strength is obvious. Everyone knows orcas are strong. You don’t need to get slapped in the air by one to know that. Six tons of muscle and a mouth full of teeth is a threat any animal can understand. But unless you’re a bundle of plankton, you aren’t afraid of a blue whale. You know exactly what’s going on.

Plenty of animals aren’t afraid of sharks. They know what’s going on. They’re like biological machines running a simple program. Find food, eat food. It’s been doing the same thing for millions of years. You can’t predict an orca because you’re looking at a mind that makes choices, decisions. They might not do what they should be doing.

You never really know what they’re thinking. One day they might ignore a swimmer entirely, and the next they’re teaching their offspring how to systematically dismantle a boat’s rudder just for the fun of it. We can’t map their motives because their motives aren’t based on survival alone. They’re based on curiosity, boredom, and social fats.

 When you’re in the water with them, you aren’t just at the mercy of a predator’s hunger. You’re at the mercy of its interest. They are the only ones in the water who might be killing you, not because they need to, but because they’ve simply decided to see what would happen. But at least in the wild, orcas and humans are still pretty chill.

Intelligence recognizes intelligence. I guess maybe we’re the dumb ones for ever thinking we could put them in captivity. But anyways, I hope you guys have enjoyed. And if you’re interested, check out our video on the largest animal in history here. It’s not actually a blue whale, but honestly, orcas would hunt this creature,