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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

Does word of killer humans travel within the whale community somehow?

Whales have a large vocabulary, large brains, social structures, and extremely old ages. Many simpler animals communicate dangers, some even have particular words for humans. It's entirely reasonable that whales might have learned at some point that whaling ships were dangerous, maybe even assuming that all ships are dangerous, and then communicate that to other whales, even for a hundred years, which is less than the lifetime of some whales.

So this is why some whales will jump out of water and fall backwards on to kayakers, killing them with their gross tonnage.

Never heard of whale killing a kayaker with a jump. Source?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2019/02/06/kayaker-s...

The linked article says: "Whales are thought to come out of the water to communicate with others, and colliding with boats and kayaks is an accidental consequence of this".

Something to consider; why don't orcas ever bite humans in the wild? The standard answer is we're too bony and taste bad. Maybe that's the reason, but it doesn't sit right with me. Sure we might be bony compared to seals, but how do orcas know we taste bad if they won't even take a nibble? Orcas seem to have zero curiosity for how we taste. Contrast this with sharks, which are known for taking a taste once in a while. Are sharks, glorified fish, really more curious than these hyper intelligent mammals? Maybe, but that seems suspect to me.

Here is what I believe; whales are capable of passing knowledge down through their generations, just like us. The power of their language is not yet fully understood, but I think it reasonable to assume they are able to express at least simple ideas like "Can I eat this?", "Do not eat that!" and "Those are dangerous to us." A language which can convey those ideas may be sufficient for whales to have memory of industrial scale whaling. I believe Orcas likely remember that humans are very good at killing whales, and subsequently know not to fuck with us. (They may also be able to reason this out by observing our capabilities today, even if they have forgotten what we once did.)

Eh - most predators don't eat new and weird looking stuff. The reason is, if you can't digest something and get sick, you can't hunt, and so you'll probably die. I think sharks are the weird one here - one factor probably being they're pretty dumb, and the other being they have a pretty tough digestive tract.

They are also cold blooded so it takes longer for a shark to starve.

Aren't pretty much all warm blooded large land predators known to eat humans on occasion? Bears, tigers, wolves, etc. Perhaps that happens because the opportunity arises more often.

Actually I think the only large warm blooded predator that hunts humans actively is a polar bear. Maybe also leopards? Could be wrong. I think other large mammals typically do it when they're old, infirm, stressed, or otherwise unable to hunt normally.

I think the closest land analogue to orcas is probably wolves, since they also live in packs, which I assume means older/weaker wolves/orcas use their social connections to other pack members to get food. This, I would expect, makes these two sorts of predators less likely to attack humans out of individual desperation. However, although it's rare, groups of wolves attacking humans as prey is not unheard of. Children are particularly at risk from what I understand, since the wolves know they're weaker. (To an orca, I think any human in the water would be weak.)

Grizzly bears also stalk humans.

Oceans don't have monkeys.

From what I understand, even among sharks actually trying to eat humans is pretty rare. It happens sometimes with species like tiger sharks (which are pretty widely regarding as being angry at the world), but most other encounters are usually mistaken identity or curiosity.

I like to think of it as ratios; the number of shark "attacks" far outweighs the number of people killed by sharks. Great whites have been known to be like "yum, a seal!", take a bite, go "what the hell is this??" and then let the person go. Except because they're an enormous shark, the person still has a huge chunk taken out of them in the process, not because the shark was actively hunting a person and was fought off.

Whales, on the other hand, have more ways to do this; they seem more willing to brush and nudge and otherwise interact with things before taking a chomp, which can be seen in some of their non-person-in-the-water interactions with boats and people on piers.

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