Why the deadliest predator in Ocean is Terrified of Humpback Whales

This is the orca. The killer whale. The ultimate  apex predator that kills pretty much everything,   from seals and great whites to even blue whales.  But the only thing they won’t dare to mess with   is this thing. The adult humpback whale. And the  second it shows up, orcas will back off and leave. So why is the ocean’s deadliest  predator so scared of a slow,   toothless whale? and why do these whales keep  going after Orcas when they can’t even hunt them? Well, the most obvious answer is just size.  Humpbacks are huge about five to six times the  

size of an orca. So maybe the orcas just look  at that and decide it’s not worth the effort,   and go find something smaller and easier to kill. And to be fair, that’s probably part of  it. But if you actually look into it,   size isn’t the reason. Because orcas  don’t leave humpbacks alone at all. They don’t. Orcas hunt humpbacks  all the time.

 Mostly the calves,   because a baby humpback is slow, clumsy, and  easy to separate from its mother. And they’ve   been doing this forever. In one study  off Newfoundland, researchers looked at   over 750 humpbacks and found that a third  of them were scarred up from orca teeth.   Orcas have been taking chunks out of these things  since long before we ever showed up with cameras.

So honestly, a humpback should just be another  thing on the menu. It’s big, it’s slow,   it doesn’t even have teeth, and there’s not much  it can really do against a coordinated pod that   takes down animals several times its size.  This thing should be running for its life. But it does the complete opposite.

See, for just about everything else in  the ocean, the sound of a hunting orca   pod is basically a fire alarm. The second they  hear it, they’re gone. But not the humpback.   The humpback hears that same sound, and it  swims straight toward it. It’ll go miles out   of its way just to reach the orcas, and then  throw itself right into the middle of them.

Scientists actually have a name  for this. They call it mobbing. But the thing is, what is a slow,  toothless whale actually going to   do against the deadliest predators in the ocean? Look at its fins for a second. A humpback’s  pectoral fins are the longest limbs of any   animal on the entire planet, up to fifteen  feet long, about a third of its whole body,   and close to a tonne each. So it’s basically  got two giant arms hanging off its sides.

And I know what you’re thinking. It’s a fin, how  much damage can a fin really do? Quite a lot,   actually. Because the edges are covered in  barnacles, these hard, razor-sharp shells.   So when a humpback rolls over  and swings one of these at you,   getting hit is like taking a baseball bat wrapped  in broken glass, swung by forty tons of muscle.

And that’s just the fins. It’s also got the tail,   a huge slab of muscle it can throw around  hard enough to crack bone in a single hit. But orcas are fast and they  hunt in groups. So why don’t   they just dodge the fins and gang up on the whale? Well, here’s the thing.

 When you’re the top  predator in the ocean, you actually have the   most to lose from a fight. Because an orca depends  on its body being perfect. It hunts by being fast,   sharp, and in one piece. So the second an orca  takes a real hit, it’s in serious trouble. A   broken jaw, a busted fin, a cracked rib and  suddenly it can’t hunt. If it can’t hunt,   it can’t eat. And if it can’t eat, it dies, or  the pod leaves it behind and it dies anyway.

So think about it from the orca’s side.  Why risk your whole life over one meal,   when you could go grab some nice,  easy seals that can’t do a thing back? It’s the same reason a lion doesn’t  pick fights with a giraffe. Sure,   it might win.

 But if that giraffe lands one kick  and cracks a rib, that lion just lost the ability   to hunt and it’s going to die slowly over the  next month. Being the apex predator doesn’t   mean you win every fight. It means you’re smart  enough to know which fights aren’t worth it. And a humpback is never worth it. Okay, so that explains the orca. It backs off  because the humpback just isn’t worth the risk.  

But it leaves a much stranger question. Why  is the humpback even there? Why is a slow,   toothless whale going out of its way  to start fights with killer whales? Now, the most obvious answer is that it’s just  protecting its own. We already said orcas hunt   humpback calves, so maybe humpbacks just attack  any orca they come across to keep their own babies   safe. And to be fair, that’s probably part of it.  But it can’t be the whole story.

 Because when you   actually look at the cases, most of the time  the humpback isn’t saving its own kind at all. And this is where it gets weird. Off the coast of  Antarctica, a pod of orcas has a seal trapped on   a slab of ice. They knock it into the water  and move in. Easy meal. But out of nowhere,   a humpback shows up, rolls onto its back,  and lifts the seal right out of the water   onto its chest and just holds it there, away  from the orcas, until they give up and leave.

A seal. Not a baby humpback. Not even a whale. This kept getting spotted, so a  marine ecologist named Robert Pitman   started gathering every case he could  find. He pulled together 115 of them,   from all over the world, going back more  than 60 years. And when researchers looked   at who the humpbacks kept charging in  to save, the numbers made no sense.

Only 11% of the time was it another humpback. The  other 89%? A completely different animal. Seals.   Sea lions. Dolphins. One time, a sunfish. Animals  a humpback has no reason on Earth to care about. But if you actually think about it, none of this  makes sense. A humpback can’t even eat a seal,   or any of these animals.

 It’s a filter  feeder that eats krill, a shrimp-like   creature smaller than your fingernail. In  other words, it’s basically a fifty-foot,   forty-ton giant that filters bugs out of the  sea for a living. But then why is it risking   its life to save a seal, when it could  just swim away like everything else does? So scientists looked into this, and  they think they’ve mostly worked out   what’s happening.

 And it comes down to one detail,   the humpback isn’t reacting to the seal  at all. It’s reacting to the sound. When orcas make a kill, they get loud, screaming  and calling to each other as they attack. And a   humpback can hear that from miles away. So the  leading idea is that the humpback doesn’t come   charging in because it saw some animal in  trouble.

 It comes charging in because it   heard orcas hunting, and it has no idea  what they’re hunting until it gets there. And there’s a reason that instinct exists. Orcas  hunt humpback calves. So over millions of years,   the humpbacks that rushed in at the  sound of an attacking pod were the   ones that saved their own babies, and  passed that instinct on.

 The rule wired   into them is dead simple. Hear orcas  attacking something, go break it up. The catch is, that rule doesn’t stop  to check who’s actually being attacked.   It just fires. So the humpback comes  flying in expecting to defend a calf,   and finds a seal instead, but by then  it’s already there, already swinging.

Basically, the humpback is the ocean’s biggest,   dumbest bouncer. It hears a fight kick off,  charges in swinging, and works out who it’s   actually defending later. Okay “dumbest”  is a bit harsh. But you get the idea. It’s the same reason a few small birds will  swarm a hawk that’s nowhere near their nest.

But here’s where it stops being that  simple. Because a lot of the time,   the humpback clearly works out that the  thing it’s protecting isn’t one of its own,   and it stays anyway. It’ll guard a random seal  for hours, keep a whole pod of orcas off an   animal it has nothing to gain from. And that’s  the part no one can fully write off as a glitch.  

Some scientists think there might actually  be something more to it. That these whales,   on some level, just don’t like watching orcas  make a kill, and will step in for anyone. So which is it? An old instinct misfiring,   or a whale that actually chooses to help?  The honest answer is, we don’t really know.

So, is the deadliest predator in the  ocean actually scared of humpback whales? Well, not exactly. It’s not that orcas are  swimming around terrified of humpbacks, shaking   at the sight of them like a seal would be of an  orca. They’re just being careful. They look at a   forty-ton animal covered in barnacles, swinging  fins that can wreck their ability to hunt,   and they do the math and decide it’s not worth  it. And honestly, that’s the smart move.

 Being the   apex predator doesn’t mean you win every fight.  It means you know which ones to walk away from. And really, “apex predator” is  just a label we came up with.   We love drawing the ocean as one clean little  pyramid, with a single killer sitting on top   and everything else underneath it. But it doesn’t  actually work that neatly down there.

 You can be   the most dangerous animal in the entire ocean,  and still spend your life quietly backing away   from a fifty-foot giant that eats bugs  and refuses to mind its own business. But this is still not the strangest thing in  the ocean. That title might go to the deep-sea   anglerfish, which has the most bizarre  way of reproducing in all of nature,   where the male bites onto the female  and slowly melts into her body,   until he’s nothing but a living part  she keeps around and uses whenever   she wants. If you wanna see how that  actually works, that video’s right here.