Dead Fish at Our Feet: Orcas, Memory, and the Lost Pact of the Sea

Reciprocity and the Dead Prey: Honoring TEK and Remembering How to Share the Sea

Lately, I’ve been captivated by these stories of orcas seemingly gifting humans dead prey, dropping fish or bits of seals near boats as if we’re meant to do something with them. It’s eerie, slightly macabre, and strangely familiar when you look back into coastal history.

There’s a real precedent for this kind of interspecies exchange. I first learned about it in one of my wildlife behavior classes, and it’s stayed with me ever since: off Twofold Bay in Australia, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a remarkable relationship between whalers (mostly European settlers) and a pod of orcas known as the Killers of Eden. These orcas, led by a legendary male named Old Tom, would herd individuals in the Mysticetes suborder (baleen whales) like humpbacks into the shallows, effectively delivering the whalers their quarry. In return, the humans were expected to honor the so-called “Law of the Tongue”: after the kill, they would secure the carcass and leave it overnight so the orcas could feast on the lips and tongue: the fattiest, most nutritious, prized parts.

This wasn’t just pragmatic: it was cultural. The local Yuin people, who have lived along the far south coast of New South Wales for countless generations, had long understood orcas as kin and protectors of the sea. Their stories tell of orcas, or beowas, guiding hunters, watching over fishing grounds, and even embodying ancestral spirits. This profound spiritual and ecological bond predated European whalers by millennia.

The settlers stepped into a relationship that already had ancient roots woven through Yuin cosmology and stewardship of land and sea. But over time, some whalers grew greedy and broke the pact, hauling in whole carcasses immediately and depriving the orcas of their share. As trust eroded, so did collaboration. When Old Tom died in 1930, his teeth worn down from tugging ropes attached to harpooned whales, no young orcas had learned the whole ritual. The living memory of that alliance faded into coastal lore, leaving behind only bones in a museum and stories passed down like sea shanties.

What fascinates me is how this ghost story intersects with what we’re seeing now. Orcas are intensely cultural and social animals. They don’t just hunt, they teach, share, and innovate. Different pods have unique hunting techniques and dialects. They pass these down matrilineally, so each pod’s behavioral repertoire is a living library.

The current reports of orcas “gifting” prey could be a form of social play, an experimental behavior to test our reactions. It could be dominance or display, a demonstration that they control the exchange of life in their waters. Or, if we stretch our imagination in line with what we know of their cognitive flexibility, it could be a kind of exploratory outreach, a feeler probing whether some ancient collaboration might be possible again.

In behavioral ecology, we know that animals often experiment with their environment when under stress or when prey dynamics shift. Many of the pods involved in this behavior are also known for ramming sailboats, which could be displaced hunting instincts, territorial defense, or just the orcas’ version of rough play. They may be searching for new ways to interact with these big, slow, floating creatures that have become so common in their world. It’s entirely plausible they’re weaving us into a new social context, trying to place us on their mental map of predator-prey, ally, or threat.

Orcas are often described as the true tricksters of the sea. They learn through social exchange and are notorious for experimenting with new behaviors. It is entirely plausible they are treating humans as accidental playmates in some bizarre exchange, offering up prey as if to say, “Here’s a fish, where’s yours?” They may also be practicing their prey-handling skills, and boats happen to be convenient drop points in the open water.

And, if I dare take the prey-handling hypothesis deeper, maybe they’re curious about how we handle their “gifts”. In the wild, orcas are known to manipulate objects for no clear immediate benefit. They play with kelp, toss fish back and forth, and sometimes even share live prey among pod members, especially to teach calves how to hunt. This “teaching by gifting” is a well-documented form of social learning in many predators: think of a mother cat dropping a half-alive mouse for her kitten. So when orcas drop dead prey near boats, it could be a socially motivated experiment: an invitation to see what we do next. Of course, this is one of those hypothetical cans of worms.

Suppose orcas are “gifting” prey to us with some expectation of a response. In that case, that implies at least a partial recognition that we are actors in their ecological stage, not just flotsam and jetsam to be ignored. In social animals like orcas, curiosity about another being’s reaction often means they perceive that being as agentive, that is, they are capable of doing something interesting or consequential in return.

Does that mean they see us as equals? I don’t expect the answer to be in the moral sense we tend to apply to ourselves, but perhaps yes, as players in a relationship that carries weight. In many apex predators, social cognition is powerfully shaped by recognizing power, skill, and role within the group. For an orca to test us with a gift could be, in their world, a way to probe whether we are worth incorporating into their mental map of “who matters here.”

From a purely biological perspective, it’s not that they would see us as fellow orcas, but they may see us as another apex predator worth monitoring. This is especially plausible when we remember how long-lived and socially complex orcas are. They have the memory and cultural capacity to develop individual and group reputations, both among themselves and across generations.

So, if we think of the Killers of Eden, that alliance suggests that orcas, given the right conditions, can indeed recognize humans as valuable partners: co-predators. Not equal in the way we might romanticize, but relevant. And relevance is the seed from which trust, suspicion, alliance, or rivalry can grow.

In a sense, that is the unnerving brilliance of these dead gifts. They’re not just lumps of meat. They’re questions: What will you do with this? Do you know how to handle it? Do you have anything to offer in return? Are you, in your clumsy, boat-rattling way, capable of reciprocity?

So, no: they may not see us as equals in the human sense, but they could seem to see us as something that can be tested, mapped, and perhaps, if we’re lucky and careful, engaged. Which might be the closest thing the ocean has to an invitation for us to remember our place in the long, ancient web of give and take.

From a cognitive ethology lens, they may be testing our responses: Do we eat it? Do we ignore it? Do we give something back? Animals with complex social structures, like orcas, often watch other creatures (including humans) to gather information that could be useful later. In this sense, the act of “gifting” might be partly about information-gathering and partly about mapping our role in their seascape: ally, curiosity, nuisance, or future partner in some new ecological game.

So, yes: biologically, behaviorally, and cognitively, it’s well within the realm of possibility that these orcas are curious about how we handle their grim little gifts. They could be testing our place in their social world, one dead fish and seal at a time.

As I have mentioned above, in many predator species, gifting prey is a powerful display of skill or social status. Among orcas themselves, mothers teach calves to hunt by offering them dead or stunned prey to handle. In the human context, this could be a kind of test or demonstration: “Are you part of our pod? Can you hunt too? No? You clumsy hominid and helpless biped!!” It could humbly be interpreted as a way of placing us in their social world, even if that place is rather unimpressive from their perspective.

Could it, in addition, be symbolic or cultural quirks? This is the part that stirs my inner poet. Orcas are one of the rare non-human species that we know have culture: they maintain regionally distinct dialects, hunting traditions, and playful rituals that are passed down through generations. Maybe, just maybe, these dead offerings are the birth (likely rebirth) of a new cultural trend in certain pods. They may have invented an odd new game, and we humans are now the unwitting recipients of their grim little gifts.

The story of the Killers of Eden is a reminder that these kinds of relationships can and do emerge when trust, reciprocity, and respect are part of the equation. We humans are so used to seeing ourselves as separate from the food web that we forget we’re often players in other species’ social experiments. The question the orcas seem to pose, every time they drop a dead fish at our feet, is unsettlingly simple: Do you remember how to share?

And finally, at the heart of this whole idea is an older principle that many Indigenous cultures have carried and honored far longer than our fleeting Western industrial memory: the ethic of reciprocity. Across countless traditional worldviews, from the Yuin people of the south coast of Australia to the coastal nations of the Pacific Northwest, the ocean and its inhabitants are not simply resources to be extracted but relatives, partners, and sometimes teachers. To take from the sea without giving back, to break the chain of respectful exchange, is to invite imbalance: a lesson we have ignored at our peril.

I’ve long admired this idea, and I consider it the central tenet of why I’m drawn to Traditional Ecological Knowledge in the first place. Reciprocity, to me, is not just a ceremonial word but the most accurate, honest way of walking and being in the world. It reminds us that we are not spectators in nature but participants in a living network of exchanges. That our actions have consequences and that we are bound by obligations, generosity, and accountability for what we take and what we offer back.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, when we begin to see other species in the natural landscape (animals, trees, forests, flowers, grass) as ancient relatives, that kinship transforms how we live. “When we name them as kin, as family, as an other-than-human people, then we are bound in a relationship to them that makes it much harder to take more than we need. And we feel compelled to protect them, to give our gifts in return.” That is the heart of a true ecological ethic. What she is reinforcing is that it then becomes much harder to drive species to extinction, to harvest more than we can use, and positions us in a better perspective to rally behind the conservation of our natural world. And as a wildlife biologist and carnivore eco-ethologist, I could not agree more, or say it better for that matter.

Reciprocity is not just an abstract moral value; it is an ecological force. When humans hold themselves within this network of relationships, it shapes how we hunt, how we share, and how we care for the ripples our actions send through that web. The story of the Killers of Eden reminds us that orcas once held us to this principle in their own way, enforcing the “Law of the Tongue” as a binding agreement between predators. The question now is whether these strange gifts washing up at our feet are an echo of that ancient contract, and whether we have the humility and imagination to answer with something more meaningful than indifference or fear.

Old Tom’s jawbone still rests in a small museum by the sea, a relic of a time when the line between hunter and hunted blurred and two apex predators found common cause in the chase. Maybe these “gifts” are an echo of that lost bond, or a chance to consider what it would mean, in this age of ecological unraveling, to imagine new ways of living with the wild that are neither sentimental nor extractive but deeply reciprocal.

In the end, these orcas and their grim offerings remind us that we are never truly outside the web of relationships that shape the living sea. A concept that I have long held as having more ramifications than merely ecological: this disconnect from our habitat is the root of so much that is going wrong within our species, from the toxic individualism that plagues society, to mental health epidemics and physiological pathologies that haunt us.

Whether they see us as playmates, rivals, or potential partners, they are asking questions in a language we once knew how to speak: the language of reciprocity, of give and take, of shared responsibility for what is killed and what is spared.

Maybe these dead fish and seal are an echo of that lost covenant we broke when we stopped honoring the Law of the Tongue. Perhaps they are an invitation to remember that our place in the natural world is not as conquerors or passive observers but as participants, bound by the same ancient agreements that tie predator to prey, hunter to hunted, life to death.

If we have the humility to listen, perhaps we can learn again what the orcas once taught the whalers of Eden: that to survive well, to belong here, is to take only what is given in good faith; and to give something back in return.