Head to Head:
Which would win in a fight, a great white shark or a killer whale?
Dominick Mayer:
My mom used to ruin a lot of things for me when I was a child. The two movies we'd watch together the most were Twister and Jaws. Because of this, when the tornado sirens sound I run outside to try and find Cary Elwes in his black caravan (he never shows) and when I go swimming I always look for Richard Dreyfuss making the quickest of quips (happened once, but I don't wish to talk about it). In particular, with Jaws, I was convinced for many years that the shark was very real and that Roy Schieder has the biggest balls of any man that's ever walked God's green earth. That got ruined in one fell swoop with a trip to Universal Studios when I was 7, when the shark on the Jaws ride froze in mid-attack, so tiny me was then face to face with the great white shark, greatest of all predators, as its eye went lazy and it started to shoot sparks out of its mouth.
That shark? Biggest pussy I've ever met.
Now, Shamu on the other hand, he's not to be fucked with. Homeboy can jump through hoops. That woman who got a little too familiar earlier this year? She won't be playing Bach anytime soon. Shamu is a certified badass, because he can flip through a hoop and kill the living shit out of you ten different ways before you ever touch the ground. He eats all the fish and isn’t afraid of anything. He's cute and cuddly, but he'll throw down with you. So to answer the original question, in a fight between Shamu and that punk bitch of a shark -- I’ll take Shamu in a second. All he'd have to do is rip the wiring right out of the Jaws shark's mouth and fly off into space. Because that is how the fuck Shamu rolls.
Ryan Peters:
Like Dominick, I assumed as a child that everything I saw in film was a) possible, and b) incredibly likely to occur at some point in my own life. Vis a vis, I spent many years operating under the belief that I would have to liberate an Orca whale from an aquatic-themed tourist park and that that whale would reach freedom by leaping over me as I touched its underside with joy. But holy fuck. I had no idea that what the whale in Free Willy actually wanted to do was strip all the meat off of that young boy’s fragile body.
Look, great white sharks deserve some credit - they are apex predators, they look fearsome as hell with their black eyes and blood-red gums, and they have what my friend Jenny calls a “Big Bird name” -- that is, a name that describes exactly what a given thing is. Moreover, this clip from “Planet Earth” is pretty frightening until you imagine the shark saying, “WHEEEEEEE” in its mind:
But regardless, great white sharks are morons. Most marine biologists believe that the majority of great white attacks on humans are actually just “test bites,” in which the shark confuses the outline of a swimmer or surfer for that of a seal and then spits the human out because homo sapiens are too bony. TOO BONY?? Sorry to offend your delicate diet, indiscriminate killing machine. Is that filet mingon grilled to your liking? Fuck you.
On top of that, sharks have to keep moving at all times or they die. That annoys me for some reason. We have humans with the same problem: we call it ADHD and we give them pills.
Orca whales (the scientific name for Killer Whales), meanwhile, should induce pants-shitting in any rational human being. Orcas are technically members of the dolphin family--the biggest members--which means that they are hyper intelligent and travel in groups known as pods. They use a complex system of communication in order to hunt as a group, and they kill their prey in absolutely sadistic ways. They’ve been known to kill sharks through a process of “tonic immobolization,” in which they turn the shark upside down in their jaws and hold them until they suffocate...FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER. You cold-blooded bastards.* They eat tuna, sharks, seals, and whales, and even somehow occasionally hunt land mammals like deer. According to this *highly-academic* Wikipedia article I read on Killer Whales, they “occasionally harass and kill porpoises and seals for no apparent reason.” No reason? It’s probably because it’s a lazy Saturday and they got bored.
The orca whale would win in a fight all day long. I’ll leave you with this story I found** about a group of orcas: “In one incident filmed near the Farallon Islands, a female killed a 3–4-metre (9.8–13 ft) long great white shark, apparently after swimming with it upside-down in her mouth and inducing tonic immobility in it. She and another pod member ate the shark's liver and allowed the rest of the carcass to sink.”
The fuck!? That’s Hannibal Lector-type cruelty. DON’T MESS WITH ORCAS PEOPLE. If you don’t die you’ll make up with a horse’s head in your bed and nightmares for life.
*That’s a biology joke, because are literally cold-blooded. But also because they will straight-up murder your ass.
** Found in the Wikipedia article, I mean.
Posted by Ryan Peters on Jun 25, 2010 @ 1:13 pm