What does it mean when a whale offers you a fish?

This story is all the more intriguing because the orca in question has been identified as one of the group that has been robustly interacting with passing yachts in the region and even causing some of them to sink. In fact, in the media she has often been portrayed as the ‘ringleader’ of these incidents. They have named her White Gladis or Estrella.

Bearers of unexpected gifts

A few years ago, Laetitia Nunny and I co-authored a book chapter about marine mammals forming relationships with people. We came across several examples of dolphins offering people gifts of their prey, mainly in the form of whole or parts of fish. One such example came from Morten Island in Queensland, Australia. Here, people have been feeding fish to bottlenose dolphins since 1992, and after a few years the dolphins started to reciprocate. They began bringing wild-caught finfish and cephalopods (squid and octopus) to the resort’s staff members as “gifts.” Similar human ‘provisioning’ of dolphins also happens in various other places around the world. (It is not an activity that I would generally recommend as it can make the dolphins concerned vulnerable to various problems.) Such inter-species gift-giving is an infrequent but established part of the culture of the provisioned dolphins.

Funghi, the famous solitary dolphin who lived in Dingle Bay, Ireland, from 1983 for a remarkable 37 years, also had the habit of trying to share fish with people. This included ‘enthusiastically throwing’ them through the air and onto vessels. In fact, many bottlenose dolphins and several rough-toothed dolphins have been recorded prey-sharing.  There is also a famous case of a leopard seal offering its prey – a penguin – to the wildlife photographer Paul Nicklen.

All the species mentioned also share food with each other within their various social groups. Clearly this is helpful to the nutrition of the group and it also helps with social cohesion. Some dolphin species are known to swim in groups of more than one species. So perhaps this ‘friendly’ cohabitation with other species might help predispose them to extending their recognition of a friendly or potentially useful species to people.

Sitting down to dinner together

Food sharing is a huge part of human culture. Sunday dinners with the family are one example. Big celebrations like weddings are also usually heavily food orientated. It turns out that food sharing is a big part of dolphin culture too, including the biggest of the dolphins, the orca.

Orcas are exceptional animals. Their brain development features remarkably high levels of encephalization (meaning relative brain to body size and complexity: only humans exhibit a higher level). They also have brain features associated with advanced communication, and cognitive, emotional, and social intelligence. They exist in many distinct populations all around the world. Populations that can differ in certain key aspects, with each population generally specialising in particular prey, some feeding on certain fish species and others on marine mammals. The knowledge of how to exploit their particular prey is clearly passed from older to younger animals. Orcas have both social learning and culture.

The critically endangered ‘Iberian orca’ group, that is now world famous because of its violent interactions with ships, specialises in fish, especially tuna. Their boat-damaging behaviour seemed to come out of nowhere and took the world by surprise. Many of us thought that it was a behavioural fad that would fade over time, but it has persisted. I have written about this in a previous blog but to recap the latest thinking here, most people studying this behaviour regard it as play of some kind. The orcas are not damaging boats to harm the people inside, they are simply playing with yachts as if they are toys.

The orca asks a question

To our human minds, an orca offering a fish to a yacht that in other circumstances it might be strongly pushing around seems a weird contrast. However, orcas offering prey to people whilst rare is not entirely novel and the Canadian marine mammal expert, Jared Towers, and some colleagues recently published a paper that compiled examples of this. They identified 34 cases of both sexes and all age classes of orcas offering prey and other items to people who were on boats (n = 21), in the water (n = 11), and on shore (n = 2) in four different oceans. A total of 18 offered species could be identified: six fish, five mammals, three invertebrates, two birds, one reptile, and one seaweed. In almost every case the whales presented the prey and then were seen to wait for a response before subsequently reacting, almost as if they were using the interaction to study us.

When it became clear that people were not going to use the offered prey the orcas usually took it away again and, in some cases, were seen to share it with their group as they would probably normally have done anyway.

Instances of wild animals offering food to people are few and far between and in their thorough and thoughtful paper Towers and colleagues suggest these interactions are examples of “interspecific generalized altruism,” meaning concern for the well-being of members of another species.

One interpretation is that Estrella was making a gesture and potentially even asking a question. The question may have been ‘are you friendly?’ – will you take the food that I offer to demonstrate some kinship? Or perhaps ‘are you like us; do you recognise what I am doing?’

Communication between intelligent aliens and humans is a common science fiction theme, including the 1977 cult movie ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, where aliens and humans finally unite around that famous musical theme. Orca intelligence is tuned by very different sensory apparatus to our own and for communal life in the sea. In this case we could be cast as the alien intelligences entering their world.

The vessel that Estrella approached was not a random one, but one that she would probably know well because it is often close to her and her family as part of a project focused on trying to keep her and the rest of her small population safe. So perhaps she recognised something very specific about this boat and the people on board. Perhaps she is asking if the people on this boat that she keeps encountering are her allies. Estrella certainly needs human friends because her life, and those of the other members of her pod, have been threatened by people who want to retaliate after their vessels were broken or who are frightened by the potential of having their boats damaged

At OceanCare we will continue to advocate for the fullest protection for Estrella and all the Iberian orcas and we will continue to monitor their situation, help to develop protective conservation plans for them and address the politics around them.

Sources

The footage of the event taken by WeWhale in June 2026 can be found on Instagram and Facebook and on EFE: Verde here

Simmonds, M.P. & Nunny, L. (2022). Marine Mammals Seeking Human Company. In: Notarbartolo di Sciara, G., Würsig, B. (eds) Marine Mammals: the Evolving Human Factor. Ethology and Behavioral Ecology of Marine Mammals. Springer, Cham.

Towers, J.R., Visser, I.N. & Prigollini, V. (2026). Testing the waters: Attempts by wild killer whales (Orcinus orca) to provision people (Homo sapiens). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 140(1), 45–55.