Lessons in Love and Loss from the World's Most Successful and Creative Hunter – The Marginalian
Rocking the waters of the entire ocean with their black and white vibrancy, orcas are the world's oldest and most successful predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the largest member of the dolphin family. Older than great white sharks, they hunt everything from seal dogs a tenth of their size to moose swimming in shallow water to the largest animal on Earth—the blue whale, whose tongue alone can weigh as much as a female orca.
The secret to these amazing feats is not brute force but strategy and synchronization.
Beneath the glistening surface that separates us from what Rachel Carson calls “those mysterious six miles in the middle of the abyss,” over the hum of intercontinental trade engines, orcas speak their sonic hieroglyphics, talking to each other eerily and calling out that animal voice that sings.
They travel in herds, search for seals in the cold atmosphere, move easily through the ice that sinks the largest ships. As soon as they have seen the deer, they swim together under the ice to break it with an underground wave, and then they start blowing bubbles from the bottom to separate the broken pieces. When the cracks are wide enough, they turn sideways to create a synchronized surface wave so large that the crust breaks through the ice, pushing the seals into the water, where the pod divides the abundance according to a complex equation of social bonds.
All the while, they teach their children how to create this symphony combination of physics and predation – further evidence of social learning as a key part of intelligence – and it is women, especially post-menopausal matriarchs, who do the teaching. Orcas have such strong bonds with their mothers that sons stay with their mothers for life — something so well documented that researchers following some long-term studies call male orcas “mama's boys.”
But while these bonds are the orcas' greatest strength, they are also their greatest vulnerability.
In 2018, when I was isolated on a small mossy island in the Puget Sound to finish my first book, I watched the world turn with terrible mercy towards a local event that did not happen – for seventeen days, across a thousand miles of ocean, a mother orca carried her dead calf lying on her head, not eating, unable to keep up with her pod. NPR called it his “grief journey.” When she lost another calf in early 2025 – two-thirds of orca pregnancies result in miscarriage or stillbirth – she did the same, this time for seventeen days.
Such visions are very refreshing because they are a sign of the wonder and tragedy of consciousness. Orcas would not have been able to be incredibly successful as hunters if they had not been able to overcome such hardships, both the performance of their complex bonds, their interdependence, their complex consciousness that separates and closes the differences between themselves and others. In the human sphere, we call this love – the consciousness factor that lies beneath the cruelest figure of evolution: As Hannah Arendt said sadly, loss is the price we pay for love. It seems unbearable as we watch the mother orca carrying her dead calf, but yet we must bear it, and bear it, no matter how long and no matter how long we may carry the dead weight of our grief – because we must, if we are worth our lives, love anyway. “Gamble everything for love, if you are a real person,” wrote Rumi. Perhaps we are here to learn that love is worth the price, at any price.
