Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You (21 page)

Nature is a violent place.
Everyone knows that living things are killed by other living things all the time, and yet despite that fact, people cling to the myth that nature is peaceful. There’s a make-believe world where even the predatory animals are gentle, if you just take the time to get to know them. Most of the time, believing in that fictional world is harmless, but in a worst-case scenario it can get someone killed.

The killer whale is a perfect example of a deadly animal that people underestimate all the time. Most people know what a killer whale looks like, but few have any idea what they do with their time in the wild. Instead, people watch
Free Willy
, or they go see killer whales do tricks at places like SeaWorld, and they get the overall impression that a killer whale is kind of like a family dog. In fact, at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, you can watch a
whale named Tilikum do all kinds of tricks, just like a dog does (and it’s much more impressive to see a 12,000-pound animal do what a trainer tells it to). Literally millions of people come to SeaWorld each year—many with their kids. Many of them probably believe that the whale they’re looking at is Willy from the movie, or at least a friendly whale like him. But the very whale they’re looking at has actually killed people. And it’s happened three separate times.
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The first death happened in 1991, when Tilikum lived at a marine park in Victoria, Canada, with two other whales. One day, a twenty-year-old trainer accidentally fell partway into the pool. Before she could pull herself out, one of the whales snatched her by the leg and dragged her under the water. The three whales ignored the other trainers’ attempts to distract them and took turns pushing the woman under as she tried to swim away, playing with her like a toy, even tearing off her clothes with their teeth, until she was dead.

Soon after that tragedy, Tilikum was moved to SeaWorld, where he still lives today. In 2010, almost nineteen years to the day after that first incident, a forty-year-old trainer was lying at the edge of the pool with her head near Tilikum’s when the whale grabbed her in his mouth and pulled her under. She tried to escape but was repeatedly pulled underwater, then allowed to swim up to the surface. Then the whale pushed her around in the pool with his nose. Her jaw was broken, her spinal cord was severed, and she drowned.

Presumably those two trainers, having spent considerable time with whales, knew just how dangerous they were. The third death, though, wasn’t of a trainer. It involved a member of the public, someone who may well have been living in the fictional
world where killer whales are gentle giants. In the summer of 1999, midway between the two trainer incidents, a twenty-nine-year-old man visiting SeaWorld watched Tilikum perform and then hid somewhere on the SeaWorld property until the staff had closed up shop and left for the day. The next morning his naked body was found underwater, draped across Tilikum’s back. His bathing suit lay at the bottom of the pool. There were no video cameras or witnesses, so no one really knows what happened to the man, but the clues hint at a gruesome death.

The first clue was that the man’s clothes (other than his bathing suit) were found in a neat pile by Tilikum’s pool, suggesting that he had planned on swimming with the whale. Second, when he was found, the man’s body was covered in cuts and bruises, he had bite marks on his face, and his scrotum had been torn open. Those wounds show that Tilikum had played with him underwater, ripping off his swimsuit, the way he had ripped the clothes off that first trainer eight years earlier. Another clue: the man had especially deep bite wounds in one of his legs. Perhaps he had dangled a foot into the water and been pulled in by the whale, or maybe he jumped in and then tried to get out, only to be pulled back underwater. We’ll never know. What is clear, though, is that Tilikum is not a gentle animal.

There’s no way to know what that man was thinking when he hatched his plan. It’s been suggested that perhaps he was knowingly committing suicide, but I think the much more likely explanation is that he didn’t see it coming. My guess is that he believed in that imaginary world of friendly whales that theme parks perpetuate to bring in visitors. I’ve even played the scene out in my head a few times. It’s night, and he approaches that pool, believing he’s about to experience something magical. The
moment of that first snatch of his leg would have been a disorienting surprise, and then the next few minutes would have been pure hell. That said, all I can really do is speculate.

In the wild, killer whales have been documented feeding on more than 140 different kinds of animals, from salmon and sharks to seagulls and sea lions.
²
Interestingly, each pod of whales will pick one kind of food and stick with it. Some eat only fish. Others, living in the same waters, will eat nothing but mammals, such as porpoises and seals. The fish eaters and the mammal eaters don’t mate with one another, and they don’t seem to interact at all. Perhaps in a few million years they’ll be separate species, but for now they’re like different societies within the whale population.
^I
There’s a lot we don’t know about killer whales, but what we do know about those mammal-eating killer whales offers insights into why Tilikum may have done what he did.

When a killer whale catches a seal or dolphin, it needs to immobilize it. A whale doesn’t want its meal to swim away after the first bite. Also, having an animal struggle while you try to gulp it down might cause you injuries like tooth breakage. Worse, the defensive bite of an eight-thousand-pound elephant seal can do quite a bit of damage, even to a killer whale weighing ten to twenty thousand pounds. So it’s best for the predatory whale to stop its prey from moving, and one way to do that is to smash it to smithereens.

For example, killer whales often toss seals or dolphins several
feet out of the water with their mouths, then catch them again. Sometimes a killer whale will bat a baby seal with its powerful tail, launching the animal fifty feet or more out of the water. These kinds of games can go on for hours—far longer than is probably necessary. The mammals eaten by killer whales don’t always get a quick death. By the time they’re eaten, they may have open wounds, broken bones, and ruptured organs. It must be a terrible way to die.

Another killer whale strategy for immobilizing mammals is to drown them. Whales can hold an animal in their teeth underwater, or they can leap out of the water and land on top of the swimming mammal, to prevent it from breathing at the surface. That works on the really big whales—like humpbacks, gray whales, and even blue whales.
³
When a pod of killer whales hunts one of those giants, the whales first surround the bigger whale; then the killer whales take turns jumping on its back, over and over, until it becomes exhausted and can be held underwater. Next, the killer whales grab their prey by its flippers and snout and drag it underwater until it drowns. From time to time, killer whales will do this to a full-grown adult, but they usually pick on baby whales separated from their mothers.
^II

There’s a striking similarity between the kinds of immobilizing predatory behaviors seen in wild killer whales and the behaviors Tilikum performed when those people got into the water with him. He bumped and poked them until they had broken
bodies and drowned. He may have been acting on instincts, or he may have remembered how to hunt from those first two or three years of his life before he was captured near Iceland and put into a pool. He didn’t eat any of those humans, but it’s not hard to understand why he brutalized them. He’s a killer whale. That’s why they’re
called
killer whales.
^III

Killer whales, and other predators like them, hurt their prey because there’s a benefit to immobilizing the prey animal, whereas there’s no benefit to minimizing the prey’s pain or suffering. Because evolution favors the selfish, it has endowed whales, cats, dogs, and many other intelligent predators with the instinctive desire to “play” with their prey while they kill. Because of predators like the killer whale, nature has become a place where animals wreak unimaginable pain and suffering on one another.

The tragedies surrounding Tilikum are a sobering reminder that wild animals don’t treat death and torture with the disdain that humans do. The simple fact is that animals just don’t hesitate to use deadly force when it benefits them, and they don’t have any reason to treat the animals they kill with respect or dignity.

That kind of carnage isn’t just restricted to whales. It’s all over the animal world. For example, there’s a North American songbird called a loggerhead shrike that impales animals alive on barbed-wire fences like trophies. To look at the bird, you’d never expect such brutal behavior: it’s just a little black-and-white thing, a bit smaller than an American robin, with a tiny, barely perceptible hook at the tip of its beak. But that small size is precisely the
reason the shrike has to do such morbid things to the animals it eats.

For their size, shrikes eat large animals—large insects, lizards and snakes, even birds and mice, some of which weigh half as much as the shrike itself. A prey animal that size is going to put up a fight if you try to eat it, and a shrike doesn’t have powerful raptorlike talons to subdue those animals while they rip them apart. That’s where the barbed-wire fence comes in. By impaling its prey alive on a meat hook, the shrike can leisurely tear into its body with that hooked beak without having to hold the animal in place. Sometimes shrikes use the thorns of plants as hooks, but when barbed-wire fences are available, that seems to be what the shrikes prefer.

Shrikes of both sexes use impaling behavior to help them feed, but males also use impaled prey to mark their territories and to advertise to females how good they are at hunting.
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I don’t know what’s creepier—that males perform that behavior or that females are turned on by it. Either way, a barbed-wire fence with dead animals spaced out at even intervals on the hooks is reminiscent of severed human heads lining the fence of a medieval fort. If the shrike version weren’t so small, it would be terrifying.

Killer whales and shrikes couldn’t be less similar in terms of body size, where they live, and what they eat, but as predators they’re united by the need to immobilize their prey, and both accomplish that task by overpowering them. That’s also true of many other kinds of predators, from lions to crocodiles, from eagles to great white sharks, and from mongooses to wolves. Those predators have to be stronger, have better acceleration, or have better stamina than the animals they eat. They feed because they can beat their prey in contests of brute-force physics.

But not all predators can win those physical contests, so a discussion of wrath in the natural world would be incomplete if I stopped there. Even if a predator isn’t strong enough to overpower its prey with physics, it might still have a chance, using chemistry.

Venom changes everything.

Some people use the terms
venom
and
poison
interchangeably, but there’s an important difference between them. Poisons are chemicals that animals use to prevent other creatures from eating them. Think of the poisonous skin secretions of a poison dart frog, for example. Venom, on the other hand, is a cocktail of chemicals that is injected into a victim with the specific purpose of harming it. Venom can be used for offense or defense; sometimes it’s used to subdue prey, and other times it’s used for protection from predators. In either case, venom is a chemical weapon. (Next time someone tells you about a poisonous snake, feel free to correct them. Snakes are sometimes venomous but never poisonous.)

Using chemistry instead of physics to hunt prey means you can eat things that are much stronger than you are, and I can think of no better example than that of a jellyfish killing and eating a fish. It’s only thanks to venom that a boneless blob is able to take down a muscular animal that normally swims circles around it.

Jellyfish deliver their venom through microscopic harpoons. Hundreds of thousands of them line each tentacle, and when a fish swims into a tentacle, the harpoons fire into its flesh, squirt venom, and then stick into the fish’s skin with back-pointing spikes, just like real harpoons do. This happens unbelievably quickly—the harpoon tips accelerate with a g-force 40,000 times
greater than gravity, and once you touch a jellyfish stinger, the whole thing is over in less than three milliseconds—a fortieth of the time it takes you to blink.
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Jellyfish venom quickly immobilizes the small animals that jellyfish eat, but it also works as a defense mechanism, preventing some animals from eating the jellyfish and causing other swimming animals, like us, to simply give the jellyfish all the space it wants.

For humans, the number one jellyfish to watch out for is the Australian box jellyfish. It weighs more than two pounds and has up to sixty ribbonlike, six-foot-long tentacles. If you swim into those tentacles and enough of those microscopic harpoons dump their venom into you, you’ll get excruciatingly painful lesions all over your skin. But that’s just what happens on the
outside
of your body. On the
inside
, things can get much, much worse.

The Australian box jellyfish’s venom makes potassium leak out of your red blood cells. As the potassium leaves, so do water and other molecules, like hemoglobin, causing the cells to become deflated and limp. Eventually, the red blood cells break apart and dissolve into fragments. That’s bad because you need red blood cells to carry oxygen from your lungs to the tissues all over your body. If the red blood cells are all destroyed, tissues all over your body will start to suffocate and die. That’s not what does you in, though. You see, all that leaked potassium, now floating around in the blood outside the red blood cells, starts to interfere with the chemical mechanisms that make your heart squeeze properly during a heartbeat. That’s how the sting of an Australian box jellyfish can cause your heart to stop beating, and that is what kills you.
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