Orca Watch

Resident orca society is matrilineal: both sons and daughters stay with their mother for life, and a matriline is led by its eldest female. Because females can live to 90, a matriline can span six generations traveling together. Orcas are one of only a handful of species, alongside humans, known to go through menopause, and a 2015 University of Exeter study found that these post-reproductive matriarchs lead the pod's foraging trips more than anyone else, especially in years when salmon are scarce, using decades of accumulated knowledge of where to find food. J2, the Southern Resident matriarch known as Granny, is the best-known example: researchers' age estimates for her at death ranged from a biopsy-based 65–80 years to as high as 105, and she was still leading her pod into her final year.

They have the second-heaviest brain of any marine mammal, after the sperm whale, and more cortical neurons than any mammal alive, including us. Only elephants and higher primates are considered to live in comparably complex social structures. Each ecotype has its own culture on top of its biology: fish-eating Residents and mammal-eating Bigg's (Transient) orcas share the same waters without interbreeding, hunt differently, and keep distinct vocal dialects passed down the matriline rather than inherited — a documented case of animal culture with, in one researcher's words, “no parallel outside humans.” They teach: mothers push calves onto the beach and pull them back if a hunt goes wrong, and in 2025 a Salish Sea orca was filmed stripping bull kelp and rolling it against another whale's body, the first confirmed tool use recorded in the species.

Orcas are apex predators with no natural predator of their own, sometimes called wolves of the sea for how they hunt in coordinated groups. They are one of the only animals that hunts great white sharks, flipping them onto their backs to induce tonic immobility before targeting the liver; orca arrivals have been observed to make white sharks flee entire areas and forage elsewhere. In 2019, orcas were recorded killing blue whales, the largest animal that has ever lived, on three separate occasions off the south coast of Western Australia, including one 18–22-metre individual — the first confirmed observations of the behavior.

Some of that intelligence looks like play, and some of it is: orcas engage in surplus killing, taking prey they have no intention of eating. A BBC film crew once watched a pod play with a Steller sea lion to exhaustion without eating it. In the Antarctic, type B orcas hunt cooperatively by swimming in tight formation to raise a wave that washes a seal off an ice floe. At Península Valdés in Argentina and the Crozet Islands, orcas beach themselves on purpose to grab sea lion pups from the shallows, then wriggle back into the water — a technique so risky that beaching is not instinctive, takes years to learn, and mothers will release a weakened, still-living seal near their calves afterward so the young orcas can practice the capture themselves.

Orcas communicate through three kinds of sound: echolocation clicks for navigation and hunting, whistles for close-range contact, and pulsed calls for reaching across distance. Every pod inherits its own dialect, a set of distinctive, stable call types passed down through the matriline the way an accent passes through a family, not through genes. Fish-eating Residents, whose salmon prey can't hear them, are far more vocal than mammal-eating Bigg's orcas, who stay largely silent because their prey can hear a call coming from a long way off. Orcas are also proven vocal learners: Wikie, a captive orca at Marineland Antibes, has been recorded mimicking human words and other species' calls, evidence that the same flexibility humans use to learn language shows up in their brains too.

What hasn't been done yet is translation. Researchers can say when certain calls tend to occur — during a hunt, on reuniting with another pod — but no one has built a dictionary mapping specific sounds to specific meanings. Two efforts working the gap from different ends: the Earth Species Project trains machine-learning models on bioacoustic recordings across species, orcas included, looking for structure in the calls before anyone claims to have translated them. Closer to home, Simon Fraser University's HALLO project (Humans and Algorithms Listening to Orcas) trains AI directly on the Southern Residents right here in the Salish Sea, building on Dr. John Ford's decades-old call catalogue to forecast where the whales are from hydrophone detections alone, aiming to warn ships before a strike rather than to hold a conversation. It's the same physical fact, sound traveling as vibration through water, that the hydrophone network below turns into a live feed, and the same instinct this site's own Code as Music project runs in reverse: infrastructure rendered as sound, instead of sound rendered as data.