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Eh - most predators don't eat new and weird looking stuff. The reason is, if you can't digest something and get sick, you can't hunt, and so you'll probably die. I think sharks are the weird one here - one factor probably being they're pretty dumb, and the other being they have a pretty tough digestive tract.

They are also cold blooded so it takes longer for a shark to starve.



From what I understand, even among sharks actually trying to eat humans is pretty rare. It happens sometimes with species like tiger sharks (which are pretty widely regarding as being angry at the world), but most other encounters are usually mistaken identity or curiosity.

I like to think of it as ratios; the number of shark "attacks" far outweighs the number of people killed by sharks. Great whites have been known to be like "yum, a seal!", take a bite, go "what the hell is this??" and then let the person go. Except because they're an enormous shark, the person still has a huge chunk taken out of them in the process, not because the shark was actively hunting a person and was fought off.

Whales, on the other hand, have more ways to do this; they seem more willing to brush and nudge and otherwise interact with things before taking a chomp, which can be seen in some of their non-person-in-the-water interactions with boats and people on piers.


Aren't pretty much all warm blooded large land predators known to eat humans on occasion? Bears, tigers, wolves, etc. Perhaps that happens because the opportunity arises more often.


Actually I think the only large warm blooded predator that hunts humans actively is a polar bear. Maybe also leopards? Could be wrong. I think other large mammals typically do it when they're old, infirm, stressed, or otherwise unable to hunt normally.


I think the closest land analogue to orcas is probably wolves, since they also live in packs, which I assume means older/weaker wolves/orcas use their social connections to other pack members to get food. This, I would expect, makes these two sorts of predators less likely to attack humans out of individual desperation. However, although it's rare, groups of wolves attacking humans as prey is not unheard of. Children are particularly at risk from what I understand, since the wolves know they're weaker. (To an orca, I think any human in the water would be weak.)


Grizzly bears also stalk humans.


Oceans don't have monkeys.




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