Why don’t Killer Whales ever attack and kill humans?

Director Steven Spielberg’s 1975 summer blockbuster Jaws cemented the great white shark as the most ferocious creature in the sea, in the minds of the movie-going public. The only trouble is, it isn’t true. While white sharks are incredible predators streamlined over more than 400 million years of evolution, they are only second best when it comes to aquatic killers. The top spot for undisputed ocean faring apex predator goes to the killer whale.

If you trace the ocean food web from top to bottom, it ends with the orca every single time. Even white sharks tremble at the sight of killer whales and flee the area when they arrive. Despite all that, we think of orcas as almost cute. We don’t give them the terrified respect they deserve, and that might be because, when we stop to think of it, we can’t think of a single time that a killer whale actually attacked a human in the wild. What gives?

Why Don’t Orcas Attack Humans?

They do, sometimes, just not very often and only under specific circumstances. It’s true that they tend to avoid us and attacks don’t happen nearly as often as they could. In recent years, orcas have even taken to attacking boats, sinking them, and depositing their passengers into the drink. Those passengers suddenly find themselves face to face with the world’s leading oceanic predator and yet, there haven’t been any deaths.

Orcas seem content to sink boats and swim away having proven their point. The vast majority of human-orca violence is perpetrated by us, and those few instances in which an orca was the aggressor almost always happen in captivity. The question of why they don’t attack us when they could, and maybe even should, will likely never be fully answered. We’re dealing with an intelligent animal carrying generations of embedded culture, and we can’t talk to them.

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