Issue 06: Killer Whales

Hi! I am sorry I have been so quiet these past few weeks.

I have been thinking about what this newsletter is for. Reading back through the old issues, I was not gripped by all of them, and if I am not gripped I can hardly expect anyone else to be. Then I remembered I have free will and that nobody is making me write about drug pipelines.

The Wild Type is a wildlife newsletter now.

The Wild Type is a look at the most interesting thing happening in the living world, written for the curious rather than the credentialed. I am Riya, a biology student, and each issue is one idea, explained properly, in about three minutes. No background required.

This week:

the whales that made a deal with us, and what it takes to break one.

At Twofold Bay, on the south-east coast of New South Wales, wild orcas used to hunt alongside the whalers.

They would find migrating humpbacks and southern rights out at sea, herd them into the bay the way a sheepdog moves a flock, and hold them. One of the males would then swim to the whaling station, breach, and slap his tail against the water until somebody came out. The whalers called him Old Tom, and at seven metres and six tonnes he was larger than the boats they rowed out to meet him in.

Once the whale was harpooned and dead, the whalers did not tow it home. They anchored the carcass and left it in the water for a day or two so the orcas could take the tongue and the lips, which was the agreed payment, and came back afterwards for the blubber and the bone, which were the parts worth money.

The arrangement was called the Law of the Tongue, and it went beyond the trade. The orcas are said to have driven sharks away from the rowing boats, and the whalers cut orcas free when they became tangled in the nets.

None of this began with the whalers. The Thaua people of the Yuin nation, who have lived on that coast for thousands of years, had been working with the whales long before any European arrived, and for them it was never a transaction. They call the killer whale beowa, and held that a Thaua person returned as one after death, which made the animals in the bay relatives who had gone on ahead. As Thaua Traditional Custodian Steven Holmes puts it, "We consider beowas to be our brothers."

For about a century, men sat in small wooden boats within reach of the most capable predator in the ocean, on nothing but an understanding, and not one of them was ever hurt.

What decides what an orca kills is not hunger. It is what her mother hunted.

In the Pacific Northwest, fish-eating and mammal-eating orcas move through the same water and want nothing to do with each other. In more than fifty years of watching, the two have never been seen to associate, and in 2024 researchers proposed classing them as separate species. What divides them is diet, and diet is taught rather than carried in the genes.

It holds even against starving. The Southern Residents are dying out now because they eat chinook salmon, the chinook are going, and they will not switch to the other fish swimming past them. An animal that will not try a different fish to save its own life is not going to try you.

Nor is it about sport. Fish-eating orcas will kill a porpoise and leave it floating, and researchers who reviewed 78 such cases put them down to play, or practice, or a misplaced attempt to mother something they had read as sick. Never to hunting.

Knowledge that specific has to be kept by somebody, and that is the matriarch, or the grandmother. Researchers following the Pacific pods found that a grandmother's death raises the risk of death for her grandcalves. Its not that she feeds them. She remembers for them. When food is hard to find, she leads them to where she knows it’ll be, because she was alive the last time it was this bad.

This appears to be what menopause is for. Females stop breeding in their thirties or forties and live past eighty, which almost nothing else does apart from us and a few whales. Everything a family knows sits in one old head, and Twofold Bay held for a century because on the whale side somebody always remembered it.

They’re trying to figure us out. Researchers have documented 34 occasions in four oceans of wild orcas approaching people and offering them prey. Rays, turtles, seals, and once a strand of seaweed. They wait to see what we do with their offerings.

A tradition starting now. Since 2020, orcas off Spain and Portugal have been ramming the rudders of yachts. It began with a few animals and spread by watching. Boats have sunk, but nobody in the water has been touched.

The Law of the Tongue ended the way agreements do. A neighbour of the whalers broke the agreement and fought Old Tom for a carcass, leaving him two teeth short. They stopped visiting after that. Tom washed up dead in 1930, and when researchers sequenced DNA from his jaw in 2023 they found no descendants anywhere. The Eden whales died out.

No wild orca has killed a human, and the reason is not that they cannot. It is that no mother has ever demonstrated it, and orcas do not improvise. Take the teaching away and it shows: every orca that has killed a person was in a tank, taken from its family young.

The orcas alive now carry their own inherited idea of what we are, held by a thinning number of old females in populations that are not doing well. We are safe because of what a few of them remember, which is a stranger thing to stand on than a law of nature.

Some cool videos to watch: