Looks like the length of an orca and great white are exactly the same. I would have thought the orca to be much larger. Couldn't the great white turn the tables here?
Not really. Orcas are much chunkier than great whites. Even the rare great white that reaches the length of an average orca would be 1/3 the weight. I've seen video of an encounter between individual members of the two species, and it wasn't even a fight. The orca just grabbed the great white and flung it like a chew toy. The you add in the fact that orcas usually (but not always BTW) form and hunt in groups, and it's understandable why a great white would run away.
There's no doubt that a great white is an impressive beast, but there are even more fearsome animals out there. Orcas for one. Sperm whales for another. Something bigger than giant squid that gets into fights with sperm whales and leaves horrific marks on their bodies. To the real heavyweight champions of the sea, a great white would be a snack.
Most of the marks are pretty clearly giant squid, but last I heard scientists were still unsure about others. Probably something very similar. It's not too surprising, really. What we know about giant squid is mostly from a very few dead ones that have washed up. The vast majority (assuming we can even judge prevalence from things like scars on sperm whales) are likely to settle on the bottom. There are a great many creatures both big and small that live and die down there with none ever reaching the surface intact enough to be recognized as a species we haven't seen before. Every single time they send a probe down there, they find new ones. Some day maybe they'll find one of the big ones that could explain those extra sperm-whale scars.
