{"id":12790,"date":"2026-04-17T21:57:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T01:57:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/lessons-in-love-and-loss-from-earths-most-successful-and-creative-predator-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T21:57:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T01:57:54","slug":"lessons-in-love-and-loss-from-earths-most-successful-and-creative-predator-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/lessons-in-love-and-loss-from-earths-most-successful-and-creative-predator-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons in Love and Loss from Earth\u2019s Most Successful and Creative Predator \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth\u2019s most creative and most successful apex 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 seals a tenth their size to moose bathing in the shallows to Earth\u2019s largest animal \u2014 the blue whale<\/a>, whose tongue alone can weigh as much as a female orca. <\/p>\n

The secret to these staggering feats is not brute force but strategy and synchrony. <\/p>\n

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Beneath the shimmering surface that divides us from what Rachel Carson called \u201cthose six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss,\u201d<\/a> through the growling din of the engines that conduct consumerism between continents, orcas are communicating in their sonic hieroglyphics<\/a>, speaking to each other in haunting and melodious voices that summon the most coordinated hunting strategy known in the animal kingdom. <\/p>\n

Traveling in matrilineal groups, they search for seals across the frozen expanse, moving effortlessly through pack ice that sinks immense ships. As soon as they identify the prey, they swim together under the ice to shatter it with a sub-surface shock wave, then begin blowing bubbles beneath to push the broken pieces apart. Once the cracks are wide enough, they turn on their sides to create a synchronized surface wave so large its crest crashes onto the ice, pushing seals into the water, where the pod divides the bounty according to a complex calculus of social bonds. <\/p>\n

All the while, they are teaching their young how to perform this collaborative symphony of physics and predation \u2014 a further testament to social learning as a key substrate of intelligence<\/a> \u2014 and it is the females, particularly post-menopausal matriarchs<\/a>, who are doing the teaching. Orcas have such strong maternal bonds that sons stay with their mothers for life \u2014 a phenomenon so well documented that the researchers behind one longitudinal study<\/a> dubbed male orcas \u201cmamma\u2019s boys.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Orca pod hunting a great blue whale. St. Nicholas<\/em> magazine, 1920.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But while these bonds are the orcas\u2019 great strength, they are also their great vulnerability. <\/p>\n

In 2018, while secluded on a small mossy island in Puget Sound to finish my first book<\/a>, I watched the world turn with shattering tenderness toward an unfolding local event \u2014 for seventeen days, across a thousand miles of ocean, an orca mother carried her dead calf draped over her head, hardly eating, barely keeping up with her pod. NPR called it her \u201ctour of grief.\u201d<\/a> When she lost another calf in early 2025 \u2014 two thirds of orca pregnancies result in either miscarriage or infant death \u2014 she did the same, this time seventeen days. <\/p>\n

Such sights so chill us because they are emblems of the miracle and tragedy of consciousness. Orcas would not be capable of such staggering success as predators if they were not also capable of such shattering grief, both a function of their intricate bonds, their collaborative interdependence, their complex consciousness that differentiates and bridges the difference between self and other. In the human realm, we call this love \u2014 the aspect of consciousness subject to the cruelest evolutionary equation: As Hannah Arendt so poignantly articulated<\/a>, loss is the price we pay for love. It seems almost unbearable as we watch the mother orca carry her dead calf, and yet we too must bear it, and do bear it, however long and however far we may have to carry the dead weight of our grief \u2014 because we must, if we are worthy of our own aliveness, love anyway<\/a>. \u201cGamble everything for love, if you are a true human being,\u201d wrote Rumi. Perhaps we are here to learn that love is worth any price, any price at all. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth\u2019s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}