Killer whales groom each other with pieces of kelp

98 points by noleary 1 week ago | 52 comments
  • metalman 5 days ago
    killer whales also share food, carrying various food items in the mouths, aaaaaand they are trying to share, with us.....like , in the open ocean, wild whales, not some marine land stunt, nope, they are throwing food at US!, to see what WE do....awsome freeky

    https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/marine-animals...

    https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/wild-orcas-offer-h...

    • subjectsigma 5 days ago
      I watched the video in the first link and it’s a pretty extreme stretch to say it was “offering food” to the human holding the camera. There was barely any indication it saw the person.

      The second video looked significantly more promising, however the video cuts away before we can actually see what the whale does.

      Unless I watch a third video and start seeing some very clear dog-playing-fetch-like behavior, I’m marking this one as highly implausible.

    • yard2010 5 days ago
      Humans think they are whale food is just the same as the cat in our yard that sure I'm gonna make a goulash from him instead of serving him some.
      • bmitc 5 days ago
        Humans certainly do kill cats both for food and "fun". And orcas will, from time to time, kill things that they don't eat. Even the exclusively fish eating orcas in the Pacific Northwest have been witnessed killing seals, even though they never eat seals.

        Not being afraid of orcas is a show of lack of respect for them. They can weight up to 10,000 pounds, swim at bursts of 35 mph, swim at slower speeds for huge stretches, launch their bodies tens of feet out of the water, and kill anything from salmon and rays to great white sharks, humpback whales, and even blue whales. There is a lot of argument that they may be the greatest predator ever, on land or sea.

        A domestic cat can easily wound a human and can usually get away. That is not true of a human in the water and an orca.

        Yes, orcas are extremely, extremely intelligent, and there's zero reason for them to eat us for nutrition, as they are highly tuned eaters that maximize their calorie intake per effort. However, a human is completely within an orca's decision process as to whether the human lives or not.

        • swores 5 days ago
          Would you mind rephrasing your comment, as currently I really don't understand what you're trying to say at all...

          edit: I originally wrote out a long comment about exactly why your comment doesn't make sense to me, but after posting it I felt it was ridiculously long for its purpose, so if you want to waste time reading it you can find it here - https://pastebin.com/Y11P8ETs - but I think asking you to explain what you meant more clearly is enough for here :)

          • dpassens 5 days ago
            GP's comment reads reasonably clear to me: humans fearing orcas might eat them are about as rational as the cat visiting GP's garden, which also seems to be convinced GP wants to harm rather than feed it.
        • jojobas 5 days ago
          Australian whalers "hired" orcas to help round up whales and paid in lips/whatever other parts orcas liked most.

          https://killerwhalemuseum.com.au/old-tom/

          • gpderetta 5 days ago
            More on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...

            I'm not sure it is so much the humans hiring the whales as opposed of the whales hiring the humans :D

            • arethuza 5 days ago
              The BBC "Strong Message Here" podcast mentioned orcas removing the livers from sharks to eat and joked about "de-liver" - now every time I see "deliver" I think of liver removal...
              • zabzonk 5 days ago
                If only they didn't live in the sea, and had developed frying pan technology, they could cook shark liver and kelp!

                But to me, the interesting question is how the orcas worked out how the great whites had livers in the first place, and why they are the best bits (big bits) to eat? I hope the are not going to investigate mine, but they don't seem interested - yet. See two orcas not eating two teeny humans: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y8iipFTBanc

            • perrygeo 5 days ago
              I've always found it strange how the study of human evolution focuses on the brain size as a proxy for the capacity for intelligence. Yet we have mammals walking and swimming around us with larger brains than us. Shouldn't the default assumption be that they too are highly intelligent, sentient beings? Human exceptionalism is a hell of a bias.
              • swores 5 days ago
                Isn't the idea of brain size being a useful proxy for intelligence quite outdated?

                Partly because there are animals with larger brains which we now know are not very intelligent, with no assumptions needed, and partly because some of the most intelligent non-primate animals that we know of actually have very small brains - like crows and other birds in the corvid family.

                • adrian_b 5 days ago
                  While brain size is not a certain sign of intelligence, it is correlated with intelligence, especially when the comparison is done between more closely related animals, which have similar brain structures.

                  The largest brains belong to elephants and cetaceans, and both are among the most intelligent animals. However comparing their brain size to that of primates would not provide useful information, because for both elephants and cetaceans large parts of their brains are dedicated to the control of various functions of their large bodies that we do not consider as relevant for "intelligence", including things like trunk control and echolocation.

                  • xeonmc 5 days ago
                    It's as they say -- Don't judge a chip by its die size.
              • robaato 5 days ago
                Nice article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/30/orca-k... These supposedly serious cetaceans have been spotted massaging each other with kelp stalks. This is the sort of performative nonsense you’d expect from dolphins
                • libraryofbabel 5 days ago
                  My absolute favorite Orca culture story (yes they have transmissible culture!) is the “salmon hat craze,” where the Orcas carry dead salmon around on their heads, apparently just for fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_hat

                  When you’re the apex predator of the world’s oceans you can get away with all sorts of silly nonsense!

                  • swores 5 days ago
                    Killer Whales, aka Orcas, actually are dolphins!

                    And they got their name as a mistranslation into English - if I remember correctly they were originally named in Spanish as "killers of whales" or "whale killers", because they do that

                    • thaumasiotes 5 days ago
                      > if I remember correctly they were originally named in Spanish as "killers of whales" or "whale killers", because they do that

                      Wiktionary supports that etymology, and it is generally a high-quality source for etymology, but it's troubling that this one isn't cited.

                      • ceph_ 5 days ago
                        All dolphins are whales. Not all whales are dolphins. It's a square / rectangle situation.

                        Orcas are indeed dolphins, and also whales.

                        • Nunanol 5 days ago
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                      • bmitc 5 days ago
                        Title should be changed from "Killer whales" to "Orcas".
                        • fuzzfactor 5 days ago
                          >Killer whales groom each other

                          If they don't do it, who will?

                          • defrost 5 days ago
                            Other creatures in the sea, perhaps.

                            Interspecies grooming is a thing, and "grooming" or at least cleaning is a side benefit from 'parasites' that clean food from predators, including from between their teeth (eg: Docker fish cleaning shark teeth).

                          • wiether 5 days ago
                            Unrelated but as an ESL, I always felt uncomfortable with the name "killer whales".

                            Not only "whales" is inappropriate according to their scientific classification, but also "killer" seems prejudicial since it inspire unwarranted fear.

                            • amelius 5 days ago
                              https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/06/orca-kil...

                              > Orcas kill for sport. They push, drag, and spin around live prey, including sea turtles, seabirds, and sea lions. Some go so far as to risk beaching themselves in order to snag a baby seal—not to consume, but simply to torture it to death.

                              We might as well call them the assholes of the sea.

                              • _Algernon_ 5 days ago
                                Cats of the sea.

                                Is them attacking luxury yachts the equivalent of my cat knocking down glasses of water?

                                • bodhiandphysics 5 days ago
                                  more like wolves of the sea, since they hunt in packs and often attack prey larger than them.
                                • santiagolarrain 5 days ago
                                  Some say they do it to teach their young how to hunt and stuff. That is educational. Might be true, since is a very social animal that live and hunt in packs of 3 generations.
                                  • mjanx123 4 days ago
                                    Play is education and skill improval in general
                                  • bmitc 5 days ago
                                    As if I needed a reason to not read The Atlantic. What in the world is that article even about given the title and subtitle? It's behind a paywall. I can't imagine that the author has zero marine mammal experience, which seems to be a common theme amongst The Atlantic authors (knowing little about that which they write about).

                                    That paragraph you quoted is pretty hyperbolic. Many orcas hunt live and dangerous animals for food. Their prey can seriously injure and even kill them. Because orcas are tight family units with several generations of females and males in the same pod who never leave the pod and because of their intelligence, orcas engage in teaching the younger orcas and each other. So this can very easily look like tortue when it's in fact how orcas train each other to work together. They will also share food readily between each other, so this is why it will also appear to be toying with food.

                                    Yes, there is no doubt that orcas will also legimitaely play with food, but even then, it's a human judgement on a wild animal that can't go pick out meat in a box that comes from an animal raised and slaughtered in a cage.

                                  • boffinAudio 5 days ago
                                    Its appropriate, inasmuch as they are an apex predator, and spend a majority of their lives hunting for food - as opposed to many other whales which filter-feed as a harvesting mechanism ..
                                    • 0x737368 5 days ago
                                      The reason they're called killer whales is because sailors saw them kill whales, so they were called whale killers and then there was a switch of the two terms.
                                      • astura 5 days ago
                                        > "killer" seems prejudicial since it inspire unwarranted fear.

                                        They are apex predators. I don't think it's prejudicial to call an apex predators "killer." It's accurate.

                                        Do you still think it's "prejudicial" after seeing how they actually behave? - https://youtube.com/watch?v=35yly16M8p4

                                        Beyond that, it's not inaccurate to call them whales. They belong to the same family as dolphins, which are toothed whales.

                                        • raincole 5 days ago
                                          Especially when the alternative is so easy to spell and pronounce...
                                          • adrian_b 5 days ago
                                            There is the alternative to call them orcas, which I prefer and which is also a much older name for them, being already used by Pliny the Elder, two millennia ago.

                                            It would have been simpler if the word "whale" would have been applied only to baleen whales, but unfortunately in the Old English tradition the word "whale" was used for any big marine animal, e.g. not only for sperm whales, but even for walruses.

                                            • kingkawn 5 days ago
                                              Other languages cannot be subjected to logic.
                                              • liveoneggs 5 days ago
                                                Murder Dolphins!
                                                • bigbacaloa 5 days ago
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