by When researcher Jared Towers set up his cameras under water to observe a few murderous whales, he saw something strange.
One of the orcas, a juvenile woman, “approached a camera that I had in the water to film her younger brother and then opened her mouth and gave a dead sea bird,” said Towers, the executive director of Bay Cetology, a Canadian team of Mariene biologists established in Alert Bay, Cnn.
She closed her mouth, pauted, apparently looking forward to the reaction of towers and hung in the water while the dead sea bird floated above her. Then, after a few seconds, she rolled around to the camera and swallowed the bird again.
A few years later, Towers saw another young female murderous whaling that showed the same behavior – this time the orca let “a freshly killed harbor stamp puppy fall directly next to my boat.”
Towers discussed these incidents with his colleagues around the world and discovered that they too had been gifted by murderous whales.
When he collected the authorities, he found 34 cases of murderous whales that present people with food between 2004 and 2024.
He and his colleagues have recorded their findings in a paper that was recently published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, where they try to unravel the reasons why fierce whales may do this.
Perhaps, she assumes, the murderous whales are curious and they investigate how people will react to a gift. Perhaps they, although they largely take this theory because whales of all ages, instead of just juveniles, play with food. Or perhaps it is a little more sinister – it is known that murderous whales use prey to attract other species and then kill them, but there is no report of orcas who once kill people in the wild.
“I don’t think it’s easy to suggest that there is one reason for this behavior because there are underlying mechanisms and nearby causes,” Towers said.
“The most important underlying mechanism is simple that they can afford to offer our food and be the most important near cause that they do this as a way to explore and then learn more about us.”
In all documents, except one of the cases, the murderous whales initially waited for a reaction of the people before most of them retrieved the food, although some just let it down and some even tried to give it again.
People almost always ignored the food; They took it only four times and in three of those cases they then threw it back into the water.
Researchers said there are many reasons why Orkas bring people food. – Ingrid N. Visser/Orca Research Trust
Pets bring their owners gifts – think of the dead mice or birds that leave cats outside the door – and animals have been observed to give gifts to each other. But so far there have hardly been any registered cases of wild predators who gave gifts to people, apart from a few cases of false murderous whales – a kind of dolphin – and leopard seals that people offer food.
“In a sense, it is not surprising, because … everyone who is on the water with (murderous whales) experienced how curious and curious they are and have had interactions that you know is something wrong between us and them,” Hanne Strager, a researcher and author who wrote “the murderer Walghalies” in the study, said CNN.
Killer whales are one of the most intelligent animals; Only people have a larger brain in relation to their body size, according to the study. And they kill much larger animals compared to their own body size than other whales and dolphins, which means that they can have more food to share.
They are also supposed to have spindle neurons in their brains – a kind of neuron that is known to be associated with empathy – said Philippa brakes, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Exeter, specialized in whales and dolphins that were not involved in the study.
Although she added that determining the motivation is difficult “because we cannot interview them,” she suggested that it could be “altruistic” or just a “basic biological function” that “something you could do with a juvenile thinking”.
The researchers discovered that it did not matter where the whale in the world was or that it was male or female, a calf, a juvenile or adult – they all showed this behavior.
It fits into a broader pattern of murderous whales that often initiate interactions with people and boats, and offers further insight into their lives.
And Torens hopes that it serves as a reminder that “Although our species is clearly technologically more advanced than all others on the planet, we share it with other highly evolved species whose well -being must be considered in our actions.”
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