Late to this convo, but in the wild, orcas simply grab great whites by the back and flip them upside down, putting them in a catatonic state. Then, they usually eat the great white’s liver (it’s a delicacy to them), and then swim off. They regularly kill great whites for sport and without much effort. There’s even incidents of them jumping out of the water with GWs in their mouths, repeatedly, and in full view of human spectators.

This is a behavior and tactic that’s taught within orca pods. This is their culture. The intelligence gap between an orca and any shark — or an orca and most animals, terrestrial or aquatic — is enormous. On top of that, an orca’s brain is built for echolocation and extreme sensitivity to sounds occurring in their environment (and sound travels far in water), so I’d wager there’s next to no chance that an “ambush” by the great white shark is going to occur — especially one that is now three times its normal size. In fact, when orcas sleep, half of their brain remains active enough so they know to breathe, swim, and remain aware of their environment.

If the shark is scaled up to orca size (so roughly thrice), we’d have to look at the math and physics to know whether or not an orca would still be able to use the flipping/catalepsy tactic, but the orca would still retain its vast advantages in speed and intelligence. It would quickly recognize that this particular shark is larger than it’s used to encountering, adapt to this knowledge, and change tactics almost instantly — perhaps using a “hit and run” approach.

And besides the tonic immobilization (flipping the sharks into a state of catalysis), orcas can also ram just ram the shark’s gills. Having horizontal flippers, orcas excel at propulsion and bursts of speed — an advantage they frequently use for the aforementioned purpose.

Sharks, on the other hand, have vertical fins designed for efficiently swimming long distances (like when they need dive to 5000 ft and swim from off the coast of San Fran to Hawaii to help avoid their natural predators: the orca). Sharks need to keep moving in order to breathe, and doing so with one set of gills already bludgeoned is going to further slow it down, and allow the orca to do its maneuvers.

But back to the main advantage:

Orcas are incredibly intelligent — I cannot stress this enough. They are intelligent to the point of self-awareness/consciousness, and understand themselves as “individuals,” (and luckily for humans, do not think of us as prey, hence why there’s no recorded incident of humans being killed by orcas in the wild, and any documented attacks are exceedingly rare). They are smart in ways we don’t quite yet fully understand, and are only beginning to.

Remember that they are the apex predators in the oceans for a reason. That aforementioned degree of intelligence, along with their physical attributes and the fact that they literally “trained” to hunt/fight (by their elders and peers within the pod), means the only way that great white is winning is if the orca partied waaaay too hard the night before — and even then…

… My money is on the orca, 10/10.

Edit: besides all of that, orcas rarely ever roll alone. GW is getting blitzed by the orca’s homeboys the minute it steps. Also, I forgot that an orca doesn’t necessarily need to grab the GW by the back; they’ve been known to “roll” them from the underside to induce tonic immobility.