Orcas Appear to Be Sharing Their Prey With Humans—but What Does It Mean?
Researchers documented 34 instances of purported prey-sharing behavior, which suggests orcas may be altruistic and capable of recognizing sentience in another species
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Jared Towers was watching a pod of orcas in Alert Bay, Canada, in 2015 when something unusual happened.
Two of the killer whales—a pair of siblings named Akela and Quiver—approached Towers with dead seabirds in their mouths. They opened their jaws to release the birds, as if offering them up to Towers. After a few moments, they snatched up the birds again and swam away, leaving Towers momentarily stunned.
Something similar happened again in 2018, when an orca appeared to offer him a harbor seal pup.
These moments stuck with Towers, executive director of the marine research company Bay Cetology. He started asking around and began documenting other instances of orcas seemingly sharing their prey with humans.
“It gives you a lot to think about, it feels special,” he tells the Seattle Times’ Lynda V. Mapes. “You spend a lot of time trying to understand these animals, and they don’t give up their secrets easily, and so when they actually stop and pay attention to you, it is a bit of a shock.”
In a new paper published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, Towers and his colleagues try to make sense of the behavior. They suggest the interactions are examples of “interspecific generalized altruism,” or concern for the well-being of members of another species. Orcas, they posit, probably recognize that humans are sentient and may be offering up their prey in an attempt to learn more about us, Towers tells NewScientist’s Marina Wang.
“Curiosity is one of the things that reduces uncertainty,” he adds.
Fun fact: An amazing orca hunting technique
In several locations, including British Columbia and Patagonia, orcas will launch themselves up onto the beach to snag seals and sea lions and then wriggle their way back into the ocean./https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b7/0f/b70fe186-c349-4d4c-a858-ef5483fb1f4b/com_com0000422_fig3a.png)
In the paper, Towers and the co-authors describe 34 instances of purported prey-sharing between orcas and humans from 2004 to 2024. The events took place around the world, from the coasts of Alaska and California to New Zealand, Argentina and Norway. The researchers identified 18 different types of orcas “gifts,” ranging from several species of rays to a strand of seaweed. Other gifts included a green turtle, an ocean sunfish, a broadnose sevengill shark and an ancient murrelet.
In the cases involving animals, most of the creatures were already dead when the orcas presented them to nearby humans. Half of the instances involved whole animals, while the other half involved “partitioned prey,” the researchers write in the paper.
In nearly all of the cases, the orca appeared to wait for a response from the human after making the offering. Then, it either recovered or abandoned the gift.
“These weren’t mistakes,” Towers tells Brenna Owen of the Canadian Press. “They weren’t like the killer whales accidentally dropped the food. They wanted to see how people responded.”
The behavior is reminiscent of prey-sharing among orcas in the same pod. The marine mammals live in social, close-knit groups, some of which have been observed executing highly coordinated and complex hunting strategies. They’re also known to divvy up prey among themselves.
The study suggests they’re capable of extending this behavior beyond their own kind, to another species.
“Orcas often share food with each other—it’s a prosocial activity and a way that they build relationships with each other,” Towers says in a statement. “That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well.”
Carl Safina, an author and ecologist at Stony Brook University, is not surprised that orcas are willing to share their food with humans. These highly intelligent creatures “understand us”—including our sentience—and seem to “comprehend the world better than we do,” he tells the Seattle Times.
“What … is more impressive is that humans basically give no credit to any other creature for having a mind,” adds Safina, who is the founder and president of the nonprofit conservation organization the Safina Center.
But just because orcas are willing to share their prey with us does not mean we should accept it, nor start sharing our food with them, the researchers caution.
“Due to the potential for either species to engage in behavior that is harmful to the other, we strongly recommend against seeking out such interactions or encouraging relationships to develop by reciprocating when they do occur,” they write in the paper.
