Killer whales remember things we’ve barely begun to understand.
I used to think culture was this uniquely human thing—you know, art museums and Shakespeare and the way my grandmother insisted on folding napkins into triangles. But then I spent an afternoon watching footage of orcas off the coast of Washington, and one group was doing something I can only describe as teaching. An older female, probably in her forties, was showing a younger whale how to beach herself deliberately to catch seals. Not just once, but over and over, with this patience that felt almost eerie. The younger one kept screwing it up, sliding back into the water too early, and the older whale would circle back and demonstrate again. What got me was the specificity—this wasn’t instinct, not in any simple sense. This was knowledge being handed down, refined over decades, maybe centuries. Turns out, different orca pods around the world have completely different hunting techniques, vocalizations, even social structures, and they don’t interbreed much, which means these differences aren’t genetic. They’re learned.
When Grandmothers Become Living Libraries of the Sea
Here’s the thing about orca grandmothers: they live decades past menopause, which is vanishingly rare in the animal kingdom. Only a handful of species do this—humans, a few whales, maybe some elephants. And researchers have figured out why: post-reproductive females are absurdly valuable. They know where to find salmon in lean years, they know which routes are safe, they remember which behaviors work. There’s this study from 2015—I think it was Croft and colleagues, give or take—that showed pods led by older females had way higher survival rates during food shortages. The grandmothers remembered a particularly bad year decades earlier and knew where to go. Wait—maybe it wasn’t 2015. Anyway, the point stands.
Dialect Boundaries That Would Make Linguists Weep With Envy
Orcas have dialects. Actual, measurable dialects. Pods that live less than a hundred miles apart sound completely different from each other, and baby orcas learn their pod’s specific calls the way human babies learn language—through imitation and repetition. I guess it makes sense when you think about it, but it’s still jarring to realize that an orca born into one pod literally cannot communicate fluently with another pod’s members. They can probably understand the basics, maybe, but the nuance is gone. Researchers can identify which family an orca belongs to just by listening to its calls, which feels like something out of science fiction but is just marine biology being weird.
And it’s not just vocalizations.
Different orca populations have completely different food preferences that persist across generations—some eat only fish, some specialize in marine mammals, some have this incredibly specific technique for hunting stingrays that involves flipping them upside down to induce tonic immobility, which is definately not something you’d figure out by accident. One pod off Argentina beaches itself on purpose to grab sea lion pups from the shore, a behavior so risky that they have to teach it carefully to young whales over years. Another group in New Zealand has learned to follow fishing boats and delicately pluck fish off longlines without getting hooked, which requires both skill and cultural transmission because the boats keep changing their methods.
The Fragile Architecture of Inherited Knowledge and What Happens When It Breaks
But here’s what keeps me up at night: this cultural knowledge is fragile. When a pod loses its matriarch, especially suddenly, the whole group can spiral. There’s documented cases of orca pods essentially forgetting how to hunt efficiently after key individuals died, and in one heartbreaking case, a young male carried his dead mother’s body for seventeen days across something like a thousand miles of ocean. The knowledge she carried—about feeding grounds, about social bonds with other pods, about survival strategies—just vanished. We don’t really know how much orcas can recieve from other pods or whether they can relearn lost techniques, but the evidence suggests cultural knowledge, once lost, might be gone for good. Honestly, it makes you realize how precarious even animal cultures are, how much depends on unbroken chains of teaching and learning stretching back generations, maybe thousands of years.
Which raises uncomfortable questions about what we’re doing to them, but that’s probably a different article.
