OCRA’S have been engaging in tons of new aggressive activity that makes scientists believe they may be getting smarter as a species.
There have been dozens of spotting’s where orcas are gruesomely killing other sea species which was not an original behavior from them.
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Orcas are apex predators and have the ability to kill a variety of animals.
But they were not participating in the “cleverly aggressive” behavior in the past.
Currently, they have been seen ganging up on blue whales and adducting baby pilot whales/sharks to eat their livers, per a Live Science report on Sunday.
Along with bullying porpoises and macabres by tossing them around with other orcas as a form of entertainment.
They were even seen sinking boats and torturing their victims.
Scientists have been trying to figure out why the whales would pick up these new hostile behaviors out of the blue.
It has been suggested that whales are able to learn new behaviors as a whole species due to the complexity of their brains.
Interactions with humans on boats/fishing activities may also be a determining factor.
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“These are animals with an incredibly complex and highly evolved brain,” Deborah Giles, an orca researcher at the University of Washington and the nonprofit Wild Orca, told Live Science.
“They’ve got parts of their brain that are associated with memory and emotion that are significantly more developed than even in the human brain.”
Josh McInnes, a marine ecologist who studies orcas at the University of British Columbia explained that it is very possible for whales to develop new traits over time.
“Behavioral change can influence anatomical change in an animal or a population” — but only over thousands of years of evolution, McInnes told Live Science.
WHALE GAMES
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A new behavior that has specifically stuck out to scientists is the orcas taunting other sea species for entertainment purposes.
In September, resident Orcas to the Salish Sea were seen playing “Pass the porpoise.”
The orcas were seen “carrying the porpoise on their backs, or ‘shouldering’ the porpoise between multiple individuals, almost appearing as a ‘game’ where the goal was to keep the porpoise out of the water,” per a study published by Wiley on September 28.
Yet porpoises are not a species that resident orcas are interested in eating as they have an abundant amount of salmon to eat in the area.
“So, we must conclude that their interactions with porpoises serve a different purpose, but this purpose has only been speculation until now,” Giles said at the time, per Live Science.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
