The Ocean's True King: Why Orcas Rule the Sea Through Culture, Not Teeth

The killer whale is the ocean's apex predator — the animal that hunts great white sharks and even other whales. But what truly makes it the sea's ruler isn't its size or its jaws. It's something far rarer in the animal kingdom: culture. Orcas don't just hunt. They teach.

Off the coast of South Africa, the most feared predator in the sea has itself become prey. Since 2017, great white sharks — the ocean's iconic killers — have been turning up dead along the shore with a single, surgical wound: their livers removed with uncanny precision, the rest of the body left untouched. The culprits are a pair of orcas known to researchers as Port and Starboard, and their hunting has been so effective that great whites have simply fled some of their historic gathering places, reshaping an entire coastal ecosystem in the process.

That story tells you orcas sit at the very top of the ocean's food chain. But it tells you something more interesting too, if you look closely at how they do it. Because the reason the killer whale is the true king of the sea is not that it is the biggest or strongest animal down there. It is that the orca is a creature of culture — an animal that learns, teaches, and passes knowledge across generations — and that turns out to be a far more powerful advantage than any set of teeth.

An apex predator that eats almost anything

First, the crown itself is not in doubt. The orca — the largest member of the dolphin family — is an apex predator with essentially no natural enemies. Sailors originally called them "whale killers," for the sight of pods hunting whales far larger than themselves; the name later flipped into "killer whale." As a species, orcas are astonishing generalists, preying on fish, seals and sea lions, dolphins and porpoises, sharks and rays, seabirds, squid — and the great whales.

They pull this off with hunting strategies that look less like instinct than like tactics. Different populations have been documented deliberately generating waves to wash seals off ice floes; intentionally beaching themselves to snatch sea lions from the shallows and then wriggling back; herding fish into tight balls to feed; and, as in South Africa, flipping sharks upside down to trigger a paralysing trance called tonic immobility before extracting the liver. These are not random acts of predation. They are specialised techniques — and that word, specialised, is the key to everything.

Different orcas, different cultures

Here is the fact that transforms our understanding of the species. Although orcas as a whole eat almost everything, individual populations are often extreme specialists — and those specialisations are learned and inherited, not hardwired into the species.

Biologists divide orcas into "ecotypes": populations that have, over long spans of time, come to focus on different prey and different ways of catching it. Some hunt only fish; others specialise in marine mammals. They differ not just in diet but in body markings, in social behaviour, and — most tellingly — in their vocalisations. Each pod has its own distinct set of calls, a dialect passed down through the family, as recognisable to researchers as a regional accent. These groups have grown so distinct, genetically and behaviourally, that scientists increasingly regard them as separate cultures, and possibly as populations on their way to becoming separate species. As one marine ecologist put it, orcas are known to have culture, much like humans do — with different orca cultures specialising in different prey and different hunting strategies.

This is genuinely rare in the natural world. Very few animals have anything resembling culture in this sense: bodies of learned knowledge, specific to a group, transmitted from one generation to the next rather than encoded in the genes. Orcas do — and it is the foundation of their dominance.

Knowledge is carried by grandmothers

If culture is the orca's great advantage, then the question becomes: how is all that knowledge kept and passed on? Part of the answer is one of the most remarkable facts in all of biology.

Orcas are among the very few animals on Earth in which females go through menopause and then live for decades beyond their reproductive years. In most species, animals reproduce until they die; in orcas, as in humans and a handful of other whales, older females stop having calves but live on — sometimes into their eighties or beyond. Why would evolution favour that? The leading explanation is that these post-reproductive matriarchs are living libraries. They carry the pod's accumulated knowledge — where to find salmon in a lean year, which hunting techniques work, the routes and rhythms of a lifetime at sea — and they lead the group, especially when times are hard. A grandmother orca's value is not in the calves she can still bear but in what she knows, and in her ability to teach it to her family. Culture needs elders to hold it, and the orca has evolved a life history that produces exactly that.

The great white lesson

Return, now, to Port and Starboard, because their story is the whole argument in miniature.

These two orcas did not inherit an instinct for hunting great white sharks. They worked it out — a specific, sophisticated technique for taking down one of the ocean's most dangerous animals, flipping it to induce paralysis and extracting the nutrient-rich liver while avoiding the rest. It is a learned behaviour, and a startlingly efficient one: what once required a coordinated group has been refined to the point that a single orca has now been filmed killing a young great white and removing its liver in about two minutes, alone. The same liver-targeting behaviour has since been documented in other parts of the world, from Australia to the Gulf of California — a technique appearing and spreading among the ocean's most intelligent hunters.

And the consequences ripple outward. As the great whites fled South African waters, the whole ecosystem began to shift — seal numbers changing, other shark species moving in to fill the vacated top spot. Two individual animals, armed with a learned skill, effectively dethroned the region's former apex predator and rewired a marine ecosystem. No amount of raw strength does that. Learning does.

What "true king" really means

We tend to crown the apex predator on the basis of power — the biggest jaws, the strongest bite, the most fearsome reputation. By that measure the great white shark has long worn the crown. But the orca's reign rests on something the shark, for all its power, does not possess: the ability to learn a new solution, teach it to its family, and pass it down the generations. That is why a pod of orcas can specialise in whatever their particular ocean offers, adapt their tactics to new prey, and, when they choose, hunt down the very predator we thought sat at the top.

The true king of the ocean, in other words, does not rule by teeth. It rules by knowledge — held in the minds of its elders, taught to its young, and refined across lifetimes. The orca is not simply the ocean's most capable hunter. It is the ocean's most capable learner. And in the end, that is the more formidable crown.

Sources and further reading

• Towner, A. et al., studies in the African Journal of Marine Science, Ecology, and related journals on the orcas "Port and Starboard" hunting great white sharks off South Africa, the liver-extraction technique, and the resulting ecosystem shifts.

• Washington Post, National Geographic, and Natural History Museum (UK) reporting on shark-hunting orcas, including the 2023–24 observations of a single orca killing a great white alone.

• Research on orca ecotypes, vocal dialects, and cultural transmission (e.g., work by researchers including Boris Worm and others) establishing orca populations as culturally and genetically distinct.

• Studies on menopause and the "grandmother" effect in orcas (e.g., work by Croft, Franks, and colleagues on post-reproductive matriarchs as knowledge-holders and pod leaders).