This example is being chosen in hindsight. You could easily have E-coli being afraid that the apes would evolve into something that destroys them, or humans being afraid that dogs would evolve into something that would destroy them.
Also, if whales could argue like this, whale relations with humans would be very different, and hunting whales for lamp oil would be unlikely, or at least would be about the same status as hunting humans for slaves is now.
Because 1) they would be able to trade with (or threaten) humans and 2) even ignoring that, humans behave differently towards obvious sentients--anti-slavery movements and anti-whale-oil movements are not comparable.
I think it is not that unlikely that they are roughly as biologically smart as us and have advanced forms of communication, but that they are just too alien and thus we haven't deciphered them yet.
Whaliezer Seacowsky, founder of the Marine Intelligence Research Institute, is giving a lecture on the dangers of AI (Ape Intelligence).
"Apes are becoming more intelligent at a faster rate than we are. At this pace, within a very short timeframe they will develop greater-than-whale intelligence. This will almost certainly have terrible consequences for all other life on the planet, including us."
Codney Brooks, a skeptic of AI x-risk, scoffs: "Oh come now. Predictions of risk from AI are vastly overblown. *Captain-Ahab, or, The Human* is a science fiction novel! We have no reason to expect smarter than whale AI, if such a thing is even possible, to hate whalekind. And they are clearly nowhere near to developing generalized capabilities that could rival ours - their attempts at imitating our language are pathetic, and the deepest an ape has ever dived is a two digit number of meters! We could simply dive a kilometer under the surface and they'd have no way of affecting us. Not to mention that they're largely confined to land!"
Whaliezer replies: "the AI doesn't need to hate us in order to be dangerous to us. We are, after all, made of blubber that they can use for other purposes. Simple goals like obtaining calories, creating light, or transporting themselves from one bit of dry land to another across the ocean, could cause inconceivable harm - even if they don't directly harm us for their goals, simply as a side effect!"
One audience member turns to another. "Creating light? What, we're afraid they're going to evolve a phosphorescent organ and that's going to be dangerous somehow? I don't know, the danger of digital intelligences seems really overblown. I think we could gain a lot from cooperating with them to hunt fish. I say we keep giving them nootropics, and if this does end up becoming dangerous at some point in the future, we deal with the problem then."