{"id":32120,"date":"2025-10-28T21:06:57","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T21:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/what-its-like-to-meet-an-orca\/"},"modified":"2025-10-28T21:06:57","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T21:06:57","slug":"what-its-like-to-meet-an-orca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/what-its-like-to-meet-an-orca\/","title":{"rendered":"What It\u2019s Like to Meet an Orca"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"What<\/a><\/p>\n

The most profound experiences of our lives are unphotographable<\/a>, untiktokable, irreducible to representation in image or gesture, for they summon the totality of our being: sensation and perception, thought and feeling, the pleasing propulsive confusion we call curiosity and the bright ablution of certainty we call wonder. Often, they are an occasion for unselfing<\/a> in an encounter with the majesty and mystery of what is not ourselves \u2014 birds migrating at midnight<\/a>, the magic of autumn<\/a>, the grandeur of Machu Picchu<\/a>; almost always, in consonance with William James\u2019s criteria for transcendent experiences<\/a>, they are ineffable. Still, we are here to tell each other what it is like to be alive and language remains the best technology we have invented for bridging the abyss between one aliveness and another. <\/p>\n

Few encounters with the wildness and wonder of this world can be more powerful than that with an orca, and no one has painted a more moving word-portrait of that encounter than Danish biologist and whale researcher Hanne Strager<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Seventeen centuries after the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder described the largest member of the dolphin family as \u201can enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth\u201d in a small passage of his thirty-seven-volume natural history encyclopedia, Carl Linnaeus named it Orcinus orca<\/em> \u2014 \u201cthe demon from the underworld.\u201d But while this striking marbled creature is nature\u2019s most successful and creative predator, it is also the tenderest, paying the same high price of consciousness that we pay.<\/a> To encounter an orca is to both to face something almost incomprehensibly other and to face the depths of ourselves. Strager channels that transcendent duality throughout The Killer Whale Journals<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the riveting record of how she escaped the cage of theory that was her landlocked biology degree and Trojan-horsed her way into an expedition to Norway\u2019s Lofoten Islands, breaking in through the cracks of the patriarchy to study Earth\u2019s most powerful matriarchal society by volunteering to cook on a small research vessel. <\/p>\n

She writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Killer whales are unconcerned with our attitudes. They don\u2019t need our love or our hatred. How we understand and interact with a big predator like the killer whale is instead a reflection of ourselves and how we want to live with the complexity of other animals around us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To come close to an orca is no easy endeavor, even for those who have ventured to the remotest and most undisturbed reaches of the oceanic wilderness. Strager recounts the thrill of trailing two elusive male orcas in the setting sun, the hint of their presence turning the sea into \u201ca piece of heavy silk\u2026 gently moved by invisible hands.\u201d But even when they vanish beneath the still surface, other senses can reveal their presence. Recounting her first experience of eavesdropping on the sea\u2019s undersound<\/a> with a hydrophone connected to an amplifier, she writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Through the headphones, I could clearly hear the splash and gurgling from the hydrophone as it sunk, and then the quietness of the big sea, with a low thrumming in the background, which I would later learn was the sound of boat traffic in the distance. But through the muffled noises of engines and water, I also heard the most incredible sounds, eerie and melodious at the same time. Like a tropical bird singing a mournful song or people whistling from far away across a deep valley.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Somewhere, in the vast ocean below me, in the great darkness under the leaden surface of the sea, animals were calling and responding to each other.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Understanding \u2014 which is a thing of the mind \u2014 that these majestic animals are dwelling below the surface is one thing, encountering them with the full creaturely sensorium of bodies meeting in space is something else entirely. Strager reflects on the inner transformation sparked by her first direct encounter with an orca:<\/p>\n

\n

A large male came up right next to the boat, so close that I could see water running down his gleaming skin. A pearly black eye just in front of the white eyepatch stared right at me. It was just a quick moment, but it stayed with me after the whale was gone. I realized that this huge killer whale had been checking us out \u2014 just as we were checking them out. To sense the awareness and curiosity of another being, and perhaps even its desire to connect, shatters an invisible barrier. It perforates the solitude of being human in a wild world where we are surrounded by creatures we don\u2019t understand and can\u2019t reach.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Immense and indifferent, the orcas have no sense of or concern with the myths and legends we have woven them into, the Instagram sensations and the scientists\u2019 journals. And yet we share the kinship of curiosity, that yearning to apprehend what it is to be another \u2014 the only thing that saves us from the existential loneliness of being ourselves<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Couple with the fascinating science of what it\u2019s like to be an owl<\/a>, then revisit what orcas can teach us about love and loss<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

donating = loving<\/h3>\n

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings<\/em><\/a> for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation<\/a>. Your support makes all the difference.<\/p>\n

\n

newsletter<\/h3>\n

The Marginalian<\/em> has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect<\/a>. Like? Sign up.<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The most profound experiences of our lives are unphotographable, untiktokable, irreducible to representation in image or gesture, for they summon the totality of our being: sensation and perception, thought and feeling, the pleasing propulsive confusion we call curiosity and the bright ablution of certainty we call wonder. Often, they are an occasion for unselfing in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 20:47:10","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}