Watch video of a mother orca hunting in front of her baby

The mother orca could have killed the sea turtle quickly. But instead, she rolled it, spun it, held it beneath the surface, and dragged it by the flipper as her calf stayed close, watching. After several minutes, the pair began to feed, tearing into the turtle’s flippers and nutrient-rich liver. 

To scientists, the hunt raises a question: Was the mom just playing with her food or was she teaching her calf to hunt, giving him the opportunity to learn?

Filmmaker Alonso Rodríguez wasn’t looking for orcas when he captured the moment. While collaborating with researchers studying the region’s orcas, he joined local fishers heading out in search of squid in the Gulf of California off Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. As the sun began to dip below the horizon, a pod of nine orcas surfaced nearby. When a mom and calf separated from the group, Rodríguez launched his drone. It captured the mother orca hunting the sea turtle with her baby at her side. 

“I always try to have my camera with me and to be ready, because you never know when something's going to happen out there in the ocean,” says Rodríguez, founder of Mares De Mexico, a conservation nonprofit. “The moment that I saw the [sea turtle] come into frame, I was like, ‘Wow, something different is going to happen.’”

A learning opportunity

Researchers have abundant evidence that animals—from bees to meerkats—learn by watching one another. Demonstrating teaching, however, is much more difficult, says Phillipa Brakes, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “Teaching is a much higher bar because it requires you to think about the intent and theory of mind of the other individual, without being able to interview them.”

To determine if an animal might be teaching, scientists rely on three criteria: The experienced animal must modify its behavior in front of the inexperienced animal, do so in a way that helps the younger animal learn faster than they would on their own, and at some kind of cost to themselves in the process, such as time, energy, or even missed feeding opportunity. 

One of the best documented examples of teaching in the wild comes from meerkats, who show their pups how to eat their favorite meal—scorpions, which have danger on both ends, pincers and a venomous stinger, says Brakes. First, the adults bring the pups dead scorpions, then live ones with the stinger removed so that the youngsters only need to manage the pincers. Eventually, they bring them live ones with the stinger intact. 

The lesson comes at a cost to the adult, who spends extra time and energy disabling the scorpions, but it gives the pups a chance to safely master the skill. “It’s very unlikely they'd have been able to do that through trial and error, because they would have died,” she says.

(Schooled: Animals That Teach Their Young)

While Brakes can’t say for certain, she thinks the orca footage appears consistent with teaching, especially as the mom is taking more time with the sea turtle than if she just wanted to eat it quickly by herself. If you consider the context, Brakes says, "it is very likely even if she's playing with that turtle, it’s to try and show that you spin them, or bite them to disable them.”

Rodríguez, who took the footage, agrees that it seemed consistent with teaching. “I was seeing how the baby was looking into what the mother was doing, and the baby sometimes got distracted and got a little bit away…” he says. “It was funny to see and to try to understand the dynamic between the mother and the baby.”

Orca calves spend a long time with their moms for protection, food, and opportunities to learn. Around the world, orcas feed on different prey; they grab seals off ice in Antarctica, eat stingrays in New Zealand, and catch young elephant seals and sea lions near the shoreline in Argentina. Some orca populations even live side by side yet specialize on entirely different prey, some eating fish while others eat other marine mammals, and they maintain that across generations. “Learning how to forage is really a very important part of their identity,” says Brakes. "This period of learning what to eat is really important for these animals.”