They amuse us by wearing salmon hats, enrage us by sinking our expensive yachts, and now they have been documented sharing their meals with us – why?

A recent report reveals that wild orcas, Orcinus orca, also known as killer whales, sometimes offer food to humans, according to the report’s lead author, Jared Towers, executive director of Bay Cetology, a whale research organization based in British Columbia.

Orcas are the oceans’ apex predators – the top predators in the seas – and they have correspondingly large brains that are second only to humans in relation to their body size. So clearly, they are capable of advanced communication skills (even including mimicking human speech; more here), cognition and emotional intelligence.

Furthermore, prey sharing is common in orca culture, so maybe sharing their lunch with humans is not really so strange after all. In fact, throughout the world, orcas of every age have presented prey to humans, and just about everything was on the menu: from sea otters, harbor seals, and gray whales, to green turtles, eagle rays, starfish, jellyfish, and even common murres, just to name a few species.

Dr Towers, along with a team of researchers from Aotearoa New Zealand and Mexico investigated 34 interactions that occurred during the past 20 years when wild orcas attempted to share prey with people in various locations of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans from California to Norway to Patagonia (Figure 1).

For this study, Dr Towers and collaborators only included incidents that met particular criteria: the whales had to have approached the people on their own volition rather than the people closely approaching the whales, and dropped the prey item in front of them.

It’s interesting to point out that in all but one of the cases, the orcas waited to see what would happen after they made the offering, and in seven cases, the orcas tried more than once to offer the prey item after the people initially refused it. On 11 of the occasions, people were in the water when the orcas approached them, in 21 cases, they were on boats, and in two cases they were on the shore (Figure 2). Some of the interactions were captured on video and in photos; others were described in interviews with the researchers.

Clearly, the orcas have a reason for sharing food with humans, but what is it?

“Orcas often share food with each other – it’s a prosocial activity and a way that they build relationships with each other,” Dr Towers explained. “That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well.”

According to Dr Towers and collaborators, this altruistic behavior makes sense because orcas are intelligent and highly social animals that use food sharing as a way to build relationships with kin as well as unrelated individuals. Further, because orcas often hunt prey much larger than themselves, they may sometimes have food to spare.

“I suspect that individual killer whales from several populations around the world having been documented offering people prey reflects how foundational prey sharing and any associated reciprocity is to the evolution of the species (like it is in humans),” Dr Towers told me in email. “This said, some populations do it more than others, which is not surprising given their differing levels of dietary specialization, resource availability, etc.”

As a native of Seattle, I was disappointed to learn that the local wild orca family pods (sometimes known as “resident orcas” to distinguish them from the more widely roaming “transient orcas”) have never been known to share their lunches with humans – although they are famous for wearing “salmon hats” on their heads.

“Some readers may wonder if resident orcas have ever been documented offering people food and if not, why. The answer is no, they have not, despite decades of research on them,” Dr Towers told me in email. “This may be because being strict dietary specialists they have less to gain through exploratory behaviour to acquire general knowledge in their environment. Furthermore, there may be times when they can not afford to share their food because their prey resources are often limited.”

That said, it is interesting to note that another group of orcas – naughty, mischievous orcas – living along the Iberian Peninsula and coastal Spain that seem to delight in sinking rich people’s yachts will sometimes offer people chunks of tuna.

How should people react if an orca tries to share food with them? Although the behavior is rare, Dr Towers says that you should document the interaction either with photographs or film, without touching the offering, and share it with the behavioral scientists at Bay Centology so we can learn more about this unusual behavior.

What do these examples of wild orcas offering to share their lunches with us tell us about them?

“I think in some cases these whales are very curious and this is just highlighting exactly how curious they can become,” Dr Towers replied.

“[K]iller whales are very complex and evolved animals,” Dr Towers added, “and that we should consider this when it comes to co-existing with them as top apex predators of different biomes on this planet.”

Source:

Jared R. Towers, Ingrid N. Visser, and Vanessa Prigollini (2025). Testing the Waters: Attempts by Wild Killer Whales (Orcinus orca) to Provision People (Homo sapiens), Journal of Comparative Psychology | doi:10.1037/com0000422

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