Orcas Off Iberia Eat Only Liver, Leave Rest

Orcas off the Iberian Peninsula have developed a new behavior in the past decade. They corner bluefin tuna, knock them senseless with their flukes, and eat only the liver, leaving the carcass to sink.

A pod will spend hours on a single fish, taking turns battering it with the kind of precision that suggests not hunger but something closer to craftwork. The behavior emerged around 2011 and has now been documented across multiple family groups, spreading through the population like a learned skill.

Marine biologists watch and scramble to explain it. The scramble assumes a particular thing must be true. That behavior requires justification such as practice, caloric efficiency, social bonding, or cultural transmission.

The unspoken logic is simple. Predators kill to eat, and any deviation from that formula demands a reason. The killing itself is assumed. The excess is what needs explaining. But watch how we handle identical behavior elsewhere. In 2015, hunters killed over 188,000 mourning doves in the United States during a single season, harvesting them for sport, and nobody asked why.

We don't demand that human hunters produce a functional justification for killing beyond survival. We call it culture, autonomy, tradition. We don't require that it reduce to efficiency. The excess is permitted. The desire needs no defense.