Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  “They were pretty happily splashing around, flipping their tails in the water,” he said. “We believe they were welcoming the artifacts home as they made their way back from Seattle, back to the reservation.”

  Indeed, pods of killer whales had been seen throughout the fall at various locales around southern Puget Sound. Whale watchers said they believed the orcas were feeding on a large run of chum salmon.

  “We believe the orcas took a little break from their fishing to swim by the ferry, to basically put a blessing on what we were doing on that day,” Forsman said.

  Most of the scientists who have worked with killer whales in the wild have stories about the odd coincidences that keep popping up around them. Ken Balcomb still laughs about how the whales always seemed to know, in the days before digital photography when he was gathering photo-identification information, when he had reached the end of his roll of film. “That’s when they would always do the really spectacular stuff, and you’d never catch it on film,” he says with a rueful smile.

  Just when you’re looking the other way …

  It’s true of captive whales and their trainers, too. When Alexandra Morton worked with the captive Northern Residents Corky and Orky at Marineland of the Pacific (before that facility was purchased by SeaWorld and the two whales transferred to San Diego), she had a funny experience along these lines. She had just returned from a trip to Vancouver Island to meet with Mike Bigg and Paul Spong and see the whales’ home pod and waters. She was discussing with one of their trainers, in Corky’s presence at the stadium, how she went about introducing new routines for the whales. The trainer asked Alex to suggest a new behavior that could be performed by the whales.

  Morton thought back to what she had seen in Johnstone Strait and suggested they try something natural to the orcas like a pectoral slap, when the whale glides along the water’s surface on its side and slaps its pectoral fin on the water, something they had never seen either Corky or Orky doing. The trainer thought this sounded like a good idea and indicated she would try it. As the trainer walked out of the stadium, Corky turned to Alex and did a pectoral slap. First one, then another. Pretty soon she was just swimming around the pool on her side, slapping happily away. Alex called the trainer back so she could see it for herself.

  “That’s whales for you,” the trainer told Morton with a laugh. “They can read your mind. We trainers see this stuff all the time.”

  • • •

  It seems as though nearly everyone who spends time around orcas has a tantalizing anecdote—or several—to tell. It would probably be possible to collect them all and write an amusing book about that. However, in the end, all they really are is anecdotes, hinting, suggesting, teasing us with the possibility that there is an intelligence, if not outright psychic powers, beyond our understanding at work with killer whales. At the same time, nearly everyone who experiences these incidents will acknowledge that in fact each could be pure coincidence, combined with an eagerness on our part to read motive into the random. We simply don’t know. Moreover, the kind of phenomenon we’re describing barely fits into any scientific category and may well be beyond anything scientifically testable. In the end, it really tells us nothing at all about the nature of these creatures or their intelligence and may obscure reality with a lot of hokum.

  The question that hangs at the center of all this speculation is a fairly simple one: Just how intelligent are orcas, really? The answer, however, is anything but simple, other than to say that we really don’t know—and a lot of the answer depends on how you define “intelligent” anyway.

  There already has been a considerable backlash in the scientific community directed toward much of the woolly material that has been published about dolphins. Justin Gregg, an accomplished dolphin scientist, has led much of the debunking, pointing out the limits of much of the more remarkable findings regarding dolphins, including Diana Reiss’s and Lori Marino’s work establishing that dolphins are capable of self-recognition in a mirror, considered one of the markers of a high level of intelligence. (There have been similar indications of self-recognition in captive orcas.) As Gregg notes, these studies are severely limited by their small data samples, and it is not really clear how much intelligence mirror self-recognition denotes.

  Moreover, as Gregg elucidates at length in his book Are Dolphins Really Smart?, much of the mythology about dolphin behavior is unadulterated nonsense. They are not particularly peace-loving. In fact they often bash and bite each other and the humans with whom they come into contact. Bottlenose dolphins do not, in fact, display superior cognitive skills in certain key tests relative to a number of other animals. Also, while the size and complexity of the dolphin brain is impressive, it is also different enough from the primate brain in fundamental structure that it is impossible to draw any scientifically valid conclusions based on the limited amount that we actually know about brain physiology.

  The story is much the same, but much more complex, when it comes to killer whales. There has been relatively little extant testing for behavioral intelligence in orcas, in part because the number of captive orcas is so small and the demand for data slight. However, a study published in 2013 did test captive orcas for imitative learning and found they had exceptional capacities in this regard and that some of these skills might help account for the social behavior of killer whales in the wild, especially group-specific traditions that are handed down from one generation of orcas to another.

  Those same traditions, however, indicate some of the limitations of the intelligence of killer whales. As far as having a healthy gene pool ripe with diversity, for instance, it does not make sense for killer whales to limit their mating activities to other killer whales within their larger community, which is how, as genetic scientists have recently determined, an array of orca “ecotypes” around the globe behave. Even though it may have made sense during an epoch of abundant prey, from a long-term biological perspective, orcas’ ultra-conservative social structure carries real negative consequences for their survival.

  Similarly, the cultural rigidity that expresses itself in their unusual selectivity when it comes to prey really limits their food choices and their abilities to feed themselves. As scientist John K.B. Ford has found, both the Southern and Northern Residents almost exclusively dine on Chinook salmon when they are present in the Salish Sea waters, which is much of the year; in the periods when Chinook are in decline, they will feed opportunistically on chum salmon but instead tend to travel to areas of the open sea where Chinook can be found at these times. Were they not so rigid about what they eat, they would find plenty more food, including abundant runs of pinks and sockeye salmon, as well as a bounty of non-salmonid species, such as lingcod and rockfish.

  A cold-eyed examination of one of the more tantalizing aspects of killer-whale intelligence, their communications and especially the dialects of their pod-specific calls, does not enhance the case for their intelligence, either. Once studied, most orca calls in the wild consist of a very limited vocabulary of about 40 sounds used by each whale, a number of which are reiterated monotonously. If each of these calls symbolizes a specific thing to orcas, in the way that we understand languages to function, then they appear mostly to be having conversations that run something like this: “Hey.” “Hey.” “Hey.” “Hey.” “I’m here.” “I’m here.” “Over here.” “Hey.” “Here.” “Wait.” “Fish.” “Hey.” “Hey.”

  Some of the scientific critics of the claims of dolphin intelligence insist that dolphins really are no more intelligent than dogs, and there are some who think the same of killer whales. Jim Borrowman, a longtime whale-watching guide from Telegraph Cove, B.C., told me that after years of being around them, he believed they were only about as smart as dogs or wolves, although he had real respect for the intelligence of the latter.

  “They’re plenty smart,” he told me, “but not that smart.”

  • • •

  So how intelligent are orcas? Well, how do you defi
ne intelligence?

  Here’s a thought experiment: suppose the scientists here on Planet Earth who are engaged in searching for signs of extra-terrestrial life were to find evidence (via, say, an interstellar probe on some distant aquatic planet) of a life form that turned out to be identical to killer whales or some other dolphin, with all the signs of intelligence, but with a similar communication barrier. Would it still qualify as an intelligent life form?

  I asked Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, whose chief work entails hunting down the possibility of intelligent life on other planets (SETI is an acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Shostak is also a well-known skeptic and critic of the pseudo-science that surrounds this field. Unsurprisingly, he quickly shot down the fanciful question for its impossible qualities, because, of course, as smart as these creatures might be, they don’t create technologies capable of flagging down intelligences from other planets.

  “In terms of what would happen if we were to find dolphins on another world, the simple answer to that is, we won’t,” he told me. “I mean, dolphins do not build radio transmitters. So you can say they’re intelligent, but not according to our definition. If you can’t solder together a transmitter, we don’t hear from them.”

  The subject of dolphin intelligence, however, has special resonance for the scientists at SETI since there was a good deal of research into dolphin communications in its earliest days, due largely to the presence of Dr. John Lilly, the pioneering cetacean researcher, in the gatherings of scientists concerned about finding extraterrestrial intelligence. One of the earliest of these, in November 1960, was dubbed “the Order of the Dolphins,” and it included such astronomical luminaries as Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, and Otto Struve.

  “There was hope in the early days that if we could learn how to communicate with the dolphins, that would give us some indication we might be able to communicate with E.T.,” Shostak said.

  Of particular note in recent years has been SETI researcher Laurance Doyle’s work examining dolphin sounds. Doyle applies a branch of mathematics called information theory, the study of the structure and relationships of information, to analyze radio signals coming from space, in the hopes of detecting one of those signals that Shostak described. He and other scientists, notably Cal-Davis’s Brenda McCowan, have tried applying the same theory to noises from bottlenose dolphins. They found that dolphins, in comparison to other animals particularly, have a language complexity comparable to humans. McCowan found, for example, that adult dolphins send information when they whistle, while infant dolphins do not; much like human babies, they only babble in comparison. Similar studies of humpback whale sounds establish that the strange songs they sing feature their own kind of syntax and have many of the basic features of a language.

  The problem of the communication barrier is not, evidently, a matter of cetacean stupidity. Indeed, although bottlenose dolphins do not have the physical ability to imitate human speech, scientists at the Dolphin Institute in Hawaii were able to teach them over a hundred human words. The dolphins were also able to comprehend entire sentences, including syntactic nuances.

  Indeed, Sagan once famously observed, “It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English—up to 50 words used in correct context—no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.”

  There are plenty of skeptics, of course, Justin Gregg among them. “Most scientists, especially cognitive scientists, don’t think that dolphins have what linguists would define as language,” he said. “They have referential signaling, which a lot of animals do—squirrels and chickens can actually do that, and monkeys—and they have names for each other. But you can’t then say they have a language because human words can do so much more.”

  At the same time, we are only beginning to get a glimpse into what it is that orca and dolphin communications really can do. “Dolphins have exquisite sound and they have a lot of places they could potentially encode information—we just haven’t looked adequately yet,” says dolphin researcher Denise Herzing. Examinations of the echolocation signals emitted by killer whales, for example, have revealed that they are comprised of extremely dense information packets, suggesting that the information they obtain in the pingbacks from those signals is very rich indeed.

  Moreover, those huge brains, for all those similarities to human brains, are structurally quite different in a fundamental way: the nerve fibers that comprise the bulk of dolphin and orca brains are built for transmitting sonic information, in contrast to the brains of most land mammals, including humans, which are dominated by visual-cortex fibers. In other words, their brains are particularly geared for processing sound information.

  This makes a great deal of evolutionary sense, considering that the liquid medium in which orcas and other cetaceans dwell is a tremendous transmitter of sound waves. Light, on the other hand, has problems in water; even the clearest of waters still only allows about a hundred yards of visual acuity for the best of eyes on the brightest and calmest of days, and most cetaceans have excellent vision. However, using their sonar capacities, orcas can “see” underwater for hundreds of yards, perhaps even up to a mile or more, expanding their “visual” realm by leaps and bounds.

  Yet if these sonic capacities are simultaneously powerful and subtle, then it seems likely that there is more than greets the human ear to the sounds they use to communicate with each other. If their brains are structurally and fundamentally different, then our criteria for “intelligence” will almost certainly be different than theirs, too. It is just as possible they see us as acoustically obtuse and primitive—since, in comparison to them, we probably are.

  For Seth Shostak, our thought experiment about extraterrestrial orcas was at least a good way to provide perspective on our own species and its presumptive claim as the planet’s only intelligence. “I think there’s a general consensus among people who study this that humans are definitely not the only intelligent species on the planet,” he said.

  • • •

  Most of what we define as “intelligence” involves the ability to form, recognize, and then manipulate abstract ideas. These ideas, particularly the ones for which we test when we want to measure intelligence and which involve measuring, investigating, and conceptualizing the world around us, are all derived from the limited number of senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. What we call “intelligence” fits within what we know of those realms. It is a decidedly human-based test.

  Orcas, too, have a limited number of senses. Their ability to see is about equal that of humans. Their sense of touch is exquisite and may be more important than we know. They have no sense of smell at all, but they do have a well-developed sense of taste roughly equal to ours.

  However, it is in the realm of hearing that killer whales’ senses reach another dimension entirely. They not only can perceive the world by the simple reception of sound, as land mammals can, but they are also capable of making sounds that reflect back to them and that, thanks to huge brains capable of translating all this information, enable them to not only see the shape and nature and inhabitants of their world, but to see inside them. That is a kind of intelligence that is simply beyond our ability to fully comprehend, let alone measure.

  At some point, the breadth of a species’ perception (that is, how many different kinds of data it receives from varying sources) and its depth of perception, the level of penetration of reality that its senses provide, should both factor into our assessment of its intelligence. If those are our criteria, then killer whales are definitively, and undeniably, more intelligent than human beings, because their echolocation sense provides both greater breadth and superior depth.

  As Marino puts it: “Orcas may not be very intelligent humans, but humans are really stupid orcas.”

  That, in fact, is the root of the problem. Even as we determinedly avoid anthropomorphizing these creatures, we almost reflexively apply a patently anthro
pocentric definition of intelligence, one involving language and its use. This is a definition that almost automatically places humans atop the heap, since our wired-in instinct for language is arguably one of our greatest evolutionary advantages.

  Dolphin scientist Thomas White (along with others) has proposed an alternative approach to defining intelligence, one that is “species-specific”: “The challenges that need to be met simply to stay alive are significantly different on the land and in the water…. [W]e need to be careful in making straightforward comparisons between human and dolphin intelligence. It may be like comparing apples and oranges.”

  Instead, White argues, we should “think about intelligence simply as the intellectual and emotional abilities that make it possible for both a species in general and its individual members to survive in their environment and to solve the problems and overcome the challenges that life throws at them.”

  Lori Marino points to the killer whales’ echolocation as evidence of a different level of intelligence: “I would say that having this sixth sense means that we’re getting only slivers of who they are from what overlap there is,” she says, noting that most attempts to assess their intelligence have tended to focus on their communications and their “language,” if that’s what they possess. “Whatever we can recognize in them that we have in ourselves, we throw that into the bag we call intelligence, and we say, ‘Well, at least we can recognize this in them and that in them,’ and so forth. But you know, that’s just a small, narrow sliver of who they are.”

  • • •

  Even if you set aside the questions about their intelligence, it’s certainly not a stretch to conceive of orcas as the oceanic counterpart to human beings. They are, in fact, not only the top predator in the ocean—nothing preys on killer whales, while they are known to consume nearly everything oceangoing, including large sharks, as well as sea birds and a stray moose or two—but they are its most successful species. Orcinus orca is known to inhabit every ocean on the planet, and while its numbers are not overwhelming, only a handful of populations of the species are endangered.