Why can killer whales be kept safely in captivity with species they would eat in the wild?
Actually, all killer whales (Orcinas orca) are not equal. We recently learned that some orcas eat nothing but fish, others eat nothing but meat, and I’m not talking about individuals, I’m talking about whole pods. Ordinarily, completely different and mutually exclusive diets would be strong taxonomic evidence that we’re looking at two different species, but not so for orcas. The reason orcas are an exception is that they are so intelligent we might be looking at a manifestation of different cultures within one species, kind of like Jews not eating pork. All of the existing whales, dolphins and porpoises share a common ancestor, about 30,000,000 years ago that had a brain about the size and complexity of ours. What that means is that all of the cetacean brains are literally 30 million years more highly evolved than ours. How could such minds not have formed a culture or cultures in that time?
