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Part 2. Great white sharks, the animal you grew up being terrified of, will abandon their hunting ground for an entire year if a single orca swims through. In 2009, off the coast of San Francisco, 17 tagged great whites fled the Farallon Islands within hours because orcas showed up. The orcas were there for less than an hour.
Two male orcas off South Africa have been doing something researchers had never documented in that part of the ocean. Their names are Port and Starboard (named because their dorsal fins flop in opposite directions, like the left and right sides of a ship). Since 2015, dead great white sharks started washing up on South African beaches with a single organ missing. Their livers had been removed with what researchers described as near-surgical cuts through the underside, and everything else was left behind.
A shark’s liver can make up a third of its total body weight. It’s the most calorie-packed organ in the animal. Port and Starboard figured out how to flip a great white upside down, which triggers something called tonic immobility (basically a catatonic state, the shark goes completely limp and can’t fight back), then tear it open and take just the liver. In June 2023, drone footage captured Starboard doing this alone, to a juvenile great white, in under two minutes. That was the first documented case of a single orca taking down a great white alone. Previous hunts involved groups of two to six orcas and took up to two hours.
Before Port and Starboard showed up, False Bay near Cape Town was one of the best-known great white hotspots on the planet. Photographers used to see 250 to 300 great whites a year. By 2020, sightings had dropped to nearly zero. A Monterey Bay Aquarium study published in Nature Scientific Reports tracked 165 tagged great whites and found the same pattern in California. When orcas came within two miles of the Farallon Islands, every single shark left. Seal kills by sharks dropped 62% in those years. One researcher put it simply: “After orcas show up, we don’t see a single shark and there are no more kills.”
And they might be teaching others. In 2022, drone footage showed five orcas working together to kill a great white in the same region, using the same liver-extraction method. Scientists now believe Port and Starboard are passing this technique on. In February 2023, the pair killed 17 sevengill sharks in a single day off Pearly Beach. All 17 had their livers removed the exact same way.
Orcas learn everything from their mothers. Food rules pass down through generations the same way language and traditions do in human families. Port and Starboard are that process happening in real time. Two orcas invented a new hunting method, perfected it, and appear to be spreading it to others. Sharks as a group have been apex predators for hundreds of millions of years, and the great white has no natural predator besides the orca. Its response when an orca shows up is to flee for months. The ocean’s actual apex predator has a blowhole.
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Orcas eat great white sharks. They hunt seals, dolphins, and baby whales. They have never killed a single human in the open ocean. Not once, in all of recorded history.
An orca's brain weighs up to 15 pounds. Yours weighs about 3. They have roughly double the brain cells we do in the regions that handle complex thought. A neuroscientist at Emory named Lori Marino put an orca brain in an MRI and found these animals can tell different species apart underwater. They do it by sending out clicks that bounce off everything around them and come back as a kind of 3D sound map (this is called echolocation). From 500 feet away, an orca knows you're a human and not a seal. It skips you on purpose.
The answer is culture. Orcas around the world are divided into at least 10 separate populations, each with its own food rules, its own language, and its own way of hunting. All of it learned from their mothers. One population eats only fish. Another eats only marine mammals like seals and sea lions. These two populations can live in the exact same water and never swap a single meal. A baby orca learns what food is from its mother, and that list stays the same for life.
In the Pacific Northwest, one population called the Southern Residents eats almost nothing but Chinook salmon. Scientists have documented them killing harbor porpoises 78 times over six decades, carrying the dead porpoises in their mouths, and never once eating them. Even when the group was starving. A 2023 study in Marine Mammal Science looked at all 78 cases and concluded it was play. These orcas would rather go hungry than eat something their culture says isn't food.
Researchers studying whale behavior in 2001 found that orca cultural traditions "appear to have no parallel outside humans." Each family group has its own dialect, its own version of the language. Calves spend about two years just learning how to make all the sounds their family uses. Mothers will slow down a hunt on purpose so their young can watch.
In 2005, a 12-year-old kid was swimming in Helm Bay, Alaska when an orca came at him full speed. At the very last second, the orca seemed to realize it was charging a human. It bent its entire body in half and turned back to open water. In captivity, it goes differently. SeaWorld's Tilikum killed three people during his life in a concrete tank. Research from 2016, published in the journal Animals, traced it to psychological collapse from being locked away from the family bonds orcas need to stay stable.
I think calling this a "mystery" undersells the science. Orcas decide what to eat based on culture, not instinct. No orca mother has ever taught her calf to hunt humans, so no orca hunts humans. Only about 75 of those salmon-eating Southern Residents are still alive. Their pregnancy failure rate is 69% because we've destroyed their salmon runs. They won't break their food culture to survive. Whether we care enough to protect theirs is the part that actually matters.
Nature is Amazing ☘️@AMAZlNGNATURE
One of the biggest mysteries to me is how Orcas, the ocean’s most efficient predators, have never attacked humans in the wild… almost like they know something we don’t.
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Amy Madigan has won Best Supporting Actress for ‘WEAPONS’ at the Oscars.
See the full winners list: bit.ly/OscarWins26


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@MLFootball Ellis would have been deported if that hit was on Mahomes.
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