Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  It is true that, unlike human beings, orcas are incapable of building great technologies or great civilizations. Yet it is also worth keeping in mind that part of their success as a species is reflected in their great longevity. While humans have only been around for about 200,000 years as a species, killer whales have been the supreme creature in the ocean for about six million years, roughly thirty times longer. It could be they have something to teach us about staying atop the food chain.

  There is plenty of evidence that should give anyone pause, moreover, before dismissing the possibility of high intelligence in killer whales. The first is that big, complex brain. It is the second-largest brain in the animal kingdom, second only to that of a sperm whale and only slightly larger than an elephant’s brain. However, the physical brain only tells us so much in general, and that is especially true if the issue is sheer mass. Like most such measures relating the brain’s physical structure to intelligence, it is at best a sort of broad indicator; the largest brains indeed belong to some of the more intelligent animals, cetaceans (both toothed and baleen), elephants, and primates. Within that range there is relatively little correlation with the differences in testable intelligence. Cows, for instance, have relatively large brains, too, but test poorly on a number of intelligence fronts.

  In the end, what matters with all these measures is how well they actually predict behaviorally measurable intelligence. It is what they do, not how they are built, that is the bottom line. For years, the intelligence quotient (IQ) was considered the basic means of measuring how smart people and animals are, but over time it has become clear that there are underlying biases built into such tests. In more recent years, it has become more common to test for the “g factor,” the general intelligence factor, which summarizes correlations between different kinds of cognition and is considered a more reliable measure of smarts.

  Relating measurable intelligence to the physical brain is tricky. The measure that is most commonly referred to is the encephalization quotient (EQ), which measures the size of the brain compared to its body-mass-related expected size (a more refined measure than raw-body-mass-to-brain size) and also happens to favor humans significantly, since they come out on top of most such scales by a good margin.

  There are a couple of measures of brain structure that do, however, correlate with cognition. The first of these is cortical thickness, a simple measure of the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain most associated with consciousness, memory, attention, language, and thought. On this scale, cetaceans also rate highly, but not as well as primates and particularly not as well as humans. In cetaceans, the cortex is relatively thin, especially compared to humans, however, cetaceans’ cortices are also structured quite differently.

  This is where the second measure, gyrification, the amount of wrinkling and folding in the cortex, comes in. What gyrification does for a brain is increase the amount of total cortical nerve tissue dedicated to processing information, making brains with more folds and wrinkles more capable of handling more data and processing it faster. On that scale, cetaceans, especially whales, are significantly ahead of their land-mammal counterparts; the scientists who examine their brains are often astonished at just how heavily folded these brains are. The gyrencephaly index (GI) for humans is about 2.2; for bottlenose dolphins, it is 5.62. The honor of having the most gyrified brain on the planet, in fact, belongs to Orcinus orca, which comes in with a GI of 5.70.

  Cross-section of a killer whale’s brain, showing the extreme amounts of folding, or gyrification, in its cerebral cortex, and an additional paralimbic lobe, absent in humans and other land mammals.

  REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION FROM LORI MARINO, ET AL., “NEUROANATOMY OF THE KILLER WHALE (ORCINUS ORCA) FROM MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGES,” The Anatomical Record, (NEW YORK: JOHN WILEY AND SONS, 2004), FIGURE 3.

  What are orcas and dolphins doing with all that brain power? Considering the predominance of auditory nerve fibers in their brains, it is a reasonable guess that they are using it to process information from their incredible hearing faculties. This correlates with the reality that these creatures possess a real sixth sense that we lack, echolocation. In other words, they probably are using those big brains to see underwater, to perceive the world in a way that we never can.

  Lori Marino observes that “orcas are the most acoustically sophisticated animals on the planet,” and much of that is related to their brain, which like that of most cetaceans has a different architecture than that of land mammals. “It’s not a completely alien brain, because they’re mammals, and all mammal brains are the same. Especially under the cortex, a brain is a brain is a brain,” says Marino. “Just as we have linguistic elaboration, a lot of things that help people conceptualize, they have their own cutting-edge elaborations. I think it would take the form of mental representation for their echolocation, and also mental processing in the form of acoustics. We know, for example, that when they echolocate they get a mental picture. So it’s not entirely acoustic. They can go back and forth between vision and echolocation very well. So there’s a certain degree of convergence in integration that happens in the brain that goes beyond just the acoustic level.”

  Indeed, there are some striking differences between orca and land-mammal brains. Scientists point out that cetacean brains have a number of other structures apparently devoted to cognition that are absent in the brains of land mammals. There is very little of the orca brain devoted to the sense of smell, and perhaps more important, the lobe of the brain that ties its two halves together, known as the corpus callosum, is very small in orcas.

  At the same time, orca brains have something that humans and land mammals don’t, a highly developed set of brain lobes called the paralimbic system. Scientists aren’t sure what it does, but they speculate that it replaces the function of some other under-developed lobes in their brains that, in land mammals, are linked to spatial memory and navigation, as well as the brain-tying functions of the corpus callosum, or it may enable some brain function we can’t even envision because we lack it.

  “We don’t know what it does,” says Marino. “We can only infer. But what we do know is that this is an area that is not identifiably elaborated at all in humans and many other mammals. So, there’s something about those cetacean brains that required them to develop something, probably having to do with processing emotions in some other way, that caused this lobe to elaborate. We don’t know.

  “It is a very mysterious part, probably the most compelling part of the brain of orcas and dolphins. Because again, we’re not used to other animals having things that we don’t have, in our brain.”

  The scientists also found that orca brains have a highly developed amygdala, the part of the brain that’s associated with emotional learning and long-term memories.

  However, what catches the attention of nearly every brain scientist is the killer whale’s insular cortex, aka the insula, one that, according to Marino, is “ridiculously elaborated.” Thus the highest GI on the planet.

  “And the insula has some very interesting functions in the mammal brain, including not only social cognition, but things that have to do with awareness, self-awareness,” she adds. “For instance, the insula is abnormal in people with obsessive-compulsive disorders. So there are things about the insula that have to do with attention, focus, thinking—it’s a very, very interesting part of the brain.”

  At present, we can only surmise what all that brain power is being directed toward. Echolocation, a genuine sixth sense, is almost certainly part of the picture, and the acoustic intelligence orcas obtain from it opens up a dimension of knowledge completely unknown to humans.

  And the orcas’ amplified empathy? We can only blindly guess what that means. However, the longtime observations of many scientists and trainers that orcas exhibit complex emotions of a wide range and have a powerful, abiding empathy for each other and for humans as well is supported by the physiological evidence, too.

  • • •

 
Orcas certainly exhibit plenty of parallels to humans. We know that killer whales (those in captivity, as well as those in the wild) have massive brains with extraordinarily keen intelligence that they display in many of their interactions with us. We also know that they engage in complex communications with each other in the calls, whistles, and clicks that they use when in proximity to each other in the wild and possibly in their echolocation signals, which enable them to see great distances underwater.

  There are other, deeper similarities: Orcas are highly social animals and generally live in tight-knit families. They live about as long as humans (the females are known to live well into their eighties, while the males generally live into their fifties). They display ritual behavior, including “greeting ceremonies” that occur when large resident pods encounter each other after long seasons of hunting in separate waters. Food-sharing behavior is common.

  There are cultures, which may extend even into biological differences, displayed by killer whales who occupy the same waters. These salmon-eating resident killer whales with whom we were kayaking are the most commonly sighted orcas in the San Juan Islands, but there are also pods of so-called “transient” orcas (also known as Bigg’s killer whales, after the late Canadian researcher, Michael Bigg, who first identified them) who come trolling through as well.

  These whales do not eat much fish, but prefer instead to munch on seals, sea lions, and various other marine mammals, including Dall’s porpoises and Pacific white-sided dolphins. They have even been observed taking down moose that were swimming, as they are known to do, between islands in the Northwest’s abundant marine archipelagoes. Unlike resident orcas, transients are not very gregarious in the water, preferring to hunt in silence, although they will vocalize avidly after a successful kill. Their stealth also makes them rather scary to encounter in a small boat in the water.

  Resident killer whales and transient killer whales do not mingle. They hunt in different zones, the transients preferring the shallow bays and rocky haulouts where seals can be found, the residents preferring the open straits where the salmon are running. They do not encounter each other often. When they do, the resident orcas—who typically outnumber the transients, sometimes by significant amounts—aggressively chase the transients away. This may be why genetic tests indicate that transients and residents have not interbred in perhaps as long as 700,000 years, longer than humans have even been around.

  The communications may be the most remarkable indicator of their intelligence, as well as their cultural proclivities. A Russian scientist studying the sound organization of the communications of various dolphin species, including orcas, observed that “both for humans and dolphins the sound organization is nearly the same in terms of complexity. On the whole, there are lots of noticeable parallels between the two species: Homo sapiens and Orcinus orca.”

  I purchased a hydrophone (a microphone for listening to underwater sound) several years ago so my family and I could listen in on the killer whales when they went past our kayaks; most of the time, in this way, we could hear them even from considerable distances. The sounds that we have heard over the years have always seemingly involved members of the pods communicating information to each other; the call and response interactions were clear, and the variety of the sounds made it obvious that this was not just random noisemaking.

  Moreover, the sounds we were hearing were part of these whales’ distinctive dialects, according to the researchers who study them. Southern Resident killer whales have a unique set of calls they use when talking to each other. These calls are similar to, but quite distinct from, calls used by Northern Residents from Vancouver Island and not even remotely like calls used by transient killer whales or killer whales in other populations who have been studied, including those in Iceland, Antarctica, and New Zealand. Moreover, researchers discovered that the orcas use discrete calls that identify them not just by their clan (that is, Northern or Southern Residents) but by their individual pods as well.

  What are they communicating? What are they saying to each other? If someone could crack that code, it might breach the barrier between humans and animals.

  “This question of recognizing intelligence and self-awareness and personhood in other animals is a difficult one, because we are limited by whatever we can understand and experience,” says Lori Marino. “The question is: Is there some way of ever getting around that? I don’t think we know.” Nor, says Marino, are we likely to. “We have been trying to find this Rosetta Stone for communications with orcas and dolphins, and everything we do applies some human-centered criteria—only because that’s really all we know, it’s all we can do. When, in fact, if the principles they use for communication are outside of our own type of system, it’s going to be very difficult if not impossible for us to understand with what we would call ‘the code.’ And so that’s going to be very, very, very hard.”

  CHAPTER Three

  The Connected Life

  I AM PRETTY CERTAIN THAT THE FEMALE ORCA DRIFTING TOWARD MY kayak is not very happy that I am there. For that matter, I am not all that happy, either. As seems to happen with killer whales, we all kind of surprised each other, and now I am stuck.

  I hadn’t intended this. The afternoon at camp on Kaikash Creek had grown quiet, and I had decided to get back on the water and see what I could see. My instincts were telling me the whales were getting near. They were right, too. No sooner had I put my little blue craft into the deep glasslike Johnstone Strait waters than a pod of orcas came tooling around the corner to the north of camp.

  An A-pod female wearing a water bubble.

  At that moment, I stop where I am, about twenty feet out from shore, and watch them approach, dropping my hydrophone into the water and pulling out my telephoto camera. Most of the pod, about twelve in all, stay out somewhat mid-channel. A whale-watching boat pulls up out further in the channel, and the tourists all come out on deck to see.

  However, there are a calf and its female minder—probably its mother, although possibly one of its “aunties” acting as a sitter—coming in closer to shore. The calf appears to be foraging, possibly chasing one of the many thousands of pink salmon that have been flocking through this wild strait, tucked along the inside shore of northern Vancouver Island, for most of this week. So many salmon have been leaping out of the water as I’ve paddled through here that I’ve thought for sure one was going to land on my boat and give me a free dinner.

  I can’t really tell what the calf is doing because it is remaining submerged for long periods, even though it seems it is in close to the rocky shore. I paddle back as far as I can, until I’m in danger of hitting some of those rocks, and then stop, knowing the orcas will just skirt around me.

  The female, however, has my attention. She is not submerging but is, rather, drifting on the surface, in a behavior the scientists call “logging,” and heading more or less in my direction. She has a water bubble on her head. One of the features of orcas’ amazing hydrodynamic black-and-white skin, which is part of what enables them to move with such speed and grace underwater, is that water actually flows through it. So when they come up to the surface, especially slowly, you will see them almost wearing the water like a membrane, until they finally burst through and make contact with the air.

  This female is doing something like that, moving at a slow and steady pace, almost drifting but actually swimming in a single-minded direction right at the surface, so that the membrane of water remains on her head and upper torso, back to her fin. She isn’t breathing through her blowhole because that would break the bubble. It is a dreamlike moment: the whale, in slow motion, heading along at the surface, the afternoon sunlight glinting off the bubble of skin-like water she is playing beneath. It lasts for minutes, a lifetime, and then it is over.

  • • •

  Orcas live a dream of man. They soar effortlessly, free of gravity, like birds or fairies through the air, gliding above the landscape and observing it from far above. Men have had this d
ream for as long as they have dreamed. It is why one of their greatest inventions is a machine that lets them fly. It is why, when we create a mythological ideal of a human and call him Superman, one of his chief attributes is that he can fly with grace and ease, as though gravity does not exist for him.

  That describes the ethereal daily life of killer whales: gliding sylphlike through their element, their large pectoral fins spread like wings, soaring above the canyons and cliffs of the ocean floor, swooping and diving weightlessly at their leisure, with intelligent minds that rule over all they survey.

  Their only real encounters with gravity occur when they play in the element—the air—that gives them such buoyancy in water. Orcas do more than merely breathe air; they leap into it with gusto, in events we call “breaching”. It is at once an attempt to defy gravity and to play in it, to celebrate and revel in the earth’s pull, to plunge briefly into a world that is both alien and native.

  The weightlessness of being is only the most obvious facet of an orca’s existence that distinguishes it from what man and his fellow primates experience. Even though they weigh thousands of pounds (tonnage that would render them slow and ponderous as land mammals, as it does elephants and whales’ long-distant cousin, the hippopotamus), a whale’s daily life is spent in a state of gravity-free seawater, buoyed especially by the lungs that are the legacy of having evolved from land mammals. This state almost certainly played a role in the evolution of whales as the largest creatures ever to roam the planet, since size does not have gravity-related energy costs associated with it in a water environment. Whales were free to evolve as large as they liked, even if they sacrificed agility and grace in the bargain, and many species did so, especially the baleen whales, who glide along the surface and with their furry plates eat tiny fish and shrimp floating there.