If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a person to fish, you will feed them for a whole lifetime. This saying is usually true. Until some orcas (killer whales) steal your prey… It seems that orcas not only manage to steal from boats and fishing, they also teach each other how to do it.
An article published in the journal Biology Letters set out to investigate whether stealing fish from boats and fishermen is becoming more common as ocean resources are depleted. Intelligent orcas have long been stealing (or taking back, depending on the point of view) seafood from humans for a long time, but it is unknown whether this has become a more common foraging route in recent years.
To answer this question, the study looked at 16 years of monitoring data from 2003 to 2018, focusing on two subantarctic killer whale populations (Orcinus orca). The information included in the dataset primarily allowed them to assess changes in the number of “destroying” events in which orcas retrieve fish from fishing nets, fishing rods, or accessible prey.
Reports of orca thefts have increased steadily since the initial incident record, and researchers believe that the increase could not be due to increased orca numbers; instead, he says it’s an indication that more of the orcas available are learning to steal from fishermen.
The rate of increase in these events reached a plateau in 2014, and researchers argue that this may be because it took 18 years for entire populations to learn the behavior after the first report of orca theft in the region in 1996.
These highly social and intelligent marine mammals appear to be highly skilled when it comes to strategizing for foraging. Moreover, they also teach stealing lessons to other orcas. Recent research has even confirmed that they can come together and take down the world’s largest animal (the blue whale), but they must have thought it was probably easier to steal from humans…
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