They’ve been documented eating swimming deer.
Exactly. It’s not that they know how we taste. It’s just that we don’t taste / smell like anything they recognize as food.
I’ve never eaten fresh-killed rhino stomach. But I bet it doesn’t smell obviously appetizing to me, despite the many tons of mammals I’ve devoured over the years. And I bet the taste is even more off-putting than the smell.
Sharks tend to spit out folks wearing wetsuits. Probably because neoprene tastes awful to them. Sadly the bite wound is still pretty severe, often fatal. I think the only thing worse than being eaten by a predator is being killed by one then *not *eaten. Such a waste. Sort of the mirror image of the ideas in that recent long thread on hunters who say “I eat what I kill.”
Everything living is a potential food source for an Orca. They don’t attack us because we are vengeful gods?
As noted upthread, they’ve been known to eat other terrestrial mammals that are rarely found in the water. So why not monkeys?
I wouldn’t think much of a “deity” who couldn’t swim.
Two billion of your fellow humans disagree with you. In fact, conveying oneself across water by means other than swimming is viewed as PROOF of supernatural ability. If humans thinking walking on water is so great, I can understand cetaceans thinking boats are pretty impressive.
In fact, they’re pretty clever to put that together.
I just noticed this. Maybe I’m blind but I don’t see anything about moose, elk, horse or bears on the wiki page.
I did find a site that says a certain group of orcas in the NE Pacific eat terrestrial mammals such as otters and the rare deer. The evidence is listed as some orcas seen eating a deer carcass in 1961, some orcas circling a rock with two deer on it and a lighthouse keeper pulling a swimming deer out of the water as it had orcas following it. So no real proof but it’s plausible. They also have a photo of a deer in the ocean with a hole in its side. It might or might not have been from an orca. If it was, they didn’t eat it so maybe that deer was a deity too. There was also one instance of people witnessing a moose being killed. Apparently, this group of orcas diverged from other orcas and some people think it should be a distinct species. One theory is that they’re not really eating them so much as juveniles are attacking them for practice.
So, I don’t see evidence of them eating elk, horse or bear, but see one case of a moose and 3-4 possible cases of deer all done by a small group of orcas.
I don’t know that we can say orcas eat other terrestrial mammals routinely when all we have are one small group that killed a moose, ate a deer carcass, and checked out a couple other deer.
Those aren’t the only possibilities - we may lack the smell or flavour they desire - or we might fail to qualify as food in some other way (sonar profile or something)
Residual soap, deodorant, etc may be off-putting?
David Brin, in Startide Rising, from his fictional *Uplift *series, offered that cetaceans gave us a pass, 'cuz we proved we were higher up the food chain. Toward the end of the book, a rogue dolphin crewmember (with Orca genes spliced in) invoked “food chain” as his justification for hunting (to eat) his dolphin crewmate. That crewmate scoffed at that (“old religion”) justification.
That same article talks about a pod making a damned good try at taking a human. Doesn’t say say they were going to EAT him, though.
Maybe they planned on batting him around like a beach ball and drowning him.
Mostly, humans have gone after other whales, the kind of whales that orcas like to eat. In fact one pod took to notifying humans of the presence of huntable whales, so that they’d get their share.
It’s entirely possible that word has gotten around. Although perhaps word isn’t the correct word. It’s more likely that, like monkeys, younger orcas learn from the behavior of older orcas.
I think the Eden orcas (link above) kind of did. In a way.
I’ve had time to look a little more and I can find no more evidence of Orcas eating deer or moose other than repetition of what I found earlier, and no evidence they’ve ever eaten elk, horse, bear, or any other terrestrial mammal, although I’d like to see an orca vs bear fight.
What I have found is that orcas are notoriously picky eaters. There are 10 different ecotypes of orcas and all 10 eat certain things. 9 of them wouldn’t be caught dead eating a deer or a human or any other land mammal. Only North Pacific Transient (Biggs) orcas have been thought to eat deer and are also the type from the story of the kid posted by Grotonian.
Since Transients swim silently close to shore searching for prey, it’s not unlikely that they’d attack something that wasn’t prey on occasion. The evidence that they actually eat deer is still very scant. I don’t think the two cases of orcas checking out deer count, so in over 50 years, there’s only two pieces of evidence that they have eaten a land mammal, the deer carcass in 1961 and the moose killed some time later.
That’s not much to go on. Perhaps they think everything on land is a deity?
Or raping him. I don’t know if orcas do that, but bottlenose dolphins like to rub their junk on each other and they’ve been known to do it to humans, too. (Link is not really NSFW, but does show dolphin dongs, so…)
But can a cetacean take the elements of a song, rearrange them into a unique sentence, and that sentence be understood by another cetacean? That, IIRC, is how Steven Pinker defines language: a coherent symbolic system that allows for the production and comprehension of unique utterances.
*“They can’t swim for shit and some of the females smell like they sprayed themselves with puke” *
That may explain why humans aren’t killed on the west coast or northeast, but how do you explain the southeast and Gulf Coast? Are you honestly suggesting that Floridians are “too clean to eat”? I realize this thread is rather light-hearted, but there is no reason to insult the intelligence of those of us who are taking it semi-seriously.
This article recounts interviews with Eskimos, who say orcas eat “whatever they can catch.”
But there’s a better source that says orcas eat a lot of terrestrial mammals in Northern Europe. I’ll look for it.
Add polar bears to the list:
(Although it says polar bear has been found in an orca stomach, not specifically that the bear was prey. But I don’t think dying bears go swimming, so MY conjecture is that it was prey.)
Would that mean that Seaworld is like Dante’s Inferno?
Maybe opportunistic scavenging? Bear dies on ice floe, orca is swimming by just as bear corpse is knocked into water, orca chomps reflexively?