Humpback whales around the globe are mysteriously rescuing animals from orcas
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When they first arrive in the spring you can see their vertebrae as they arch their back for a dive. After eating all summer, you can see how much they've filled out by the time they pass through on their way south in the fall. When they arch for a dive they've fattened up enough that you can't see individual vertebrae anymore.
It's an amazing experience to paddle a kayak out into a calm bay and sit for an hour surrounded by a dozen humpbacks, or to sit in a calm stretch of ocean with whales surfacing as far as you can see in every direction. They'll come within ten feet of a kayak, and you know they'll never bother you. They just seem curious about what's out in the water with them.
They engage in bubble-net feeding. A group of humpbacks circle underwater beneath a school of herring. They let out bubbles and build a wall of bubbles around the herring. The whales then swim up inside the bubbles and break the surface with their mouths open, feasting on the trapped herring. It's wild to see a ring of bubbles appear near you on the surface, and then see half a dozen whales rise up out of the water with their mouths open.
My favorite part of being close to whales is listening to them breathe. You can hear the size of their lungs from the sound of their breaths.
If you've never been close to whales, try to get on a whale watching tour. They're just incredible to see in person.
But there's amazing kayaking throughout coastal Alaska. The panhandle has the inside passage, with miles of relatively protected waters. You can kayak in Glacier Bay, or up near Homer, or the Aleutians if you're badass.
If you go with a tour, be careful who you book with. There are operations that take care to bring people to places that are good for beginners to kayak. For example one company here brings their clients to a secluded cove where people won't face big swells or wind or boat wakes. But another company launches people right from downtown, where they immediately face big boat wakes, and the wind can pick up uncomfortably for beginners.
Gotta say that it worked.
I personally have more experience with packrafting, which I highly recommend. High quality lightweight packrafts can easily be carried on/in a day pack. A recent packrafting trip I did: drive 1 hour south of Anchorage to Portage railroad stop, take the train 20 minutes south to the Spencer Glacier stop, paddle around the lagoon adjacent to the glacier (don't get too close, it calves frequently and can be quite dangerous), then paddle all the way back to the car on the Placer River (not a technical river)... about 8 hours total trip time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcXU7G6zhjU
We don't know for sure if it really is showing appreciation at the end, but humpback whales are social animals so IMO it's plausible. It certainly makes a big effort at breaching despite being trapped for a long time and despite there being no other whales nearby. Why would it do that if it's not trying to communicate with the humans?
Or maybe the whale was just having a lot of fun now that it could move.
Or maybe it's a really big thank you like you suggest :)
If it's either of the latter though, I do find that interesting behavior regardless.
There's also a radiolab episode with an account of divers rescuing a humpback whale from a net:
Then again, maybe you could make the same claim about humans. :-)
Part of me says it is highly unlikely that Humpback whales have a vendetta against killer whales and are the policeman of the oceans, but the bigger part of me, wants to believe that they are exactly that!
It's also very easy to assume humans are more special than we actually are.
People just forget or don't know that the same spark that powers our physical bodies also powers the physical bodies of other living things.
With slightly less snark, altruism and other noble sentiments in humans are also likely due to genetics and learned behavior.
Some of his quotes, source Wikipedia:
"To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us."
"In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores."
Well, that was a good reason why we initially liked them, but the last few millennia of genetic modification through selective breeding to alter their behavior and appearance for our benefit hasn't hurt either...
That is, they are probably good evidence for some emotions in animals, but fairly useless in their current incarnation as to whether it was naturally occurring. Interestingly, it's entirely possible (and likely, IMO) that they exhibited some of this behavior originally due to their social nature, and this is what causes humans to start the process of domestication in the first place (not that it was likely a decision like that).
What's really interesting is how quickly changes, both behavioral and physical happen during domestication (and how quickly domestication works, possibly on the order of a decade or so)[1].
On that note, I'll leave you with this, which is wonderful: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/4rkdit/text_we_didnt_s...
Years ago I had a lurcher, raised from a pup. One day I noticed that if you spoke to him in a stern manner - even if he had done absolutely nothing wrong he would hang his head low and look up at you, and put his tail between his legs as if he was guilty of something bad and wanted to look contrite.
It seems to me that it may be a long ago learned, now instinctive, behaviour to react that way to a particular tone of human voice.
It is also easy to assume that an animal's internal life is dumb and uninteresting.
When a certain type of great cat kills, say, an antelope, it will look around carefully. Humans first describing this behavior assumed the cats were feeling guilty for killing and wanted to check if there were any "witnesses".
Nowadays, this behavior is interpreted as checking for hyenas, who like to snatch away prey from other predators.
I would not consider this behavior dumb or uninteresting, but it is - probably - for a different reason than a human observer might naively assume.
Being aware that animals might do things for different reasons than humans is not dismissing the animal's motives, it can be a key to understanding its behavior. It is not at all the same as assuming an animal's internal life is dumb and uninteresting, at least I do not think the GP wanted to imply that.
I think that we also very easily 'anthropomorphize' human behavior; that is to say that we superimpose our own assumptions onto other people's behaviour.
We are animals too, and the rational part is only a thin, recent addition to our brains.
I believe many animals are just as intelligent as us in their own way.
i thought it was Aquaman. the dolphins are his deputies.
Moreover, people who are not egoists freak me out. To me, such people are the ultimate hypocrites and I fell that I can't trust them with anything.
But to get back to the point, as an individual, the only reason you would do something like this is because you feel better knowing that you have sacrificed your life to save other people's lives. Because, presumably, you couldn't live with yourself if you didn't. So if that's your way of dealing with the situation - that's fine, I guess. I still think you're an egoist for doing it.
You appear to have constructed a weird, intentionally specifically narrow definition of altruism as a strawman. Congratulations on slaying it.
Truly altruistic would be something we just do without any benefit for ourself. I just argued that this only exists on a philosophical level, not on a biological level, so I don't believe in the concept unless we agree to treat the brain as a blackbox.
I agree. I find arguments for lack of free will strange. If we don't have it, then what's the point of anything, including arguing whether we have it? It's not about being right or wrong for me, but rather that I'll always accept the illusion of free will, because anything else is just boring and depressing.
And who knows, maybe in the end we'll discover that there's randomized quantum effects that break the determinism. While not quite free will, at least it's an out from the boring and depressing alternative.
I personally believe that quantum effects don't break the determinism, just because I like to. Otherwise there is more space for a god and I am to lazy to invent my own, while I am absolutely certain that the current ideas of him are wrong. I like the idea that there has been something at the beginning much more. Then it can be something simple like "time does not flow linearly" and you are done.
In the end it does not matter whether we will take even more blue pills or somehow get to experience the red pill. Either way it is a hell of a show and not boring at all.
That definition of altruism doesn't even work on a philosophical level, since one can always level an unfalsifiable charge that /some/ part of the brain is perceiving the altruistic action as a reward.
- Anonymous philanthropy => feelings of self worth
- Low reward public service (Mother Theresa) => fame and influence
- Parents sacrificing personal good for kids => some kind of evolutionary advantage
- Falling on a grenade => Avoiding survivors guilt
I don't mean to present strawman arguments for these scenarios - if they are silly I apologize. In any case, it seems to me that denial of altruism always ends up stretching the definition of selfish and shrinking the definition of selfless, so that any scenario can fit.
I don't think that the possibility that the latter might have some indirect self-benefit keeps it from being an act of altruism, for any reasonable definition of altruism. I mean, "some kind of evolutionary advantage" is a plausible explanation for pretty much any behavior by any animal on Earth.
Common misunderstanding, but this is not true. Genes do not have any desires at all.
Dawkins wrote "The Selfish Gene" to explore a metaphor, not explain how biology actually works. He thought it would be an interesting way of looking at evolution, and he was right. It was so interesting that people started taking him literally.
Anyway, it seems obvious that taking care of kids is not a genetic inevitability, because of the large numbers of parents who fail to do a good job of taking care of their kids.
Why doesn't it make me feel bored, sleepy, nauseous, repulsed, angry, etc. ?
There seems to some serious latent Puritanism in this discussion.
Come on, how can you possibly call this "self-less"?? If you're doing something for someone you love, it's because you love them. That's the ultimate good-feeling. You're doing it to feel good, period. I hate people who do things like this and then say "I acted selflessly for you". No, you didn't, you moron. You acted as selfish as can be. Now, thank you very much for doing what you did for me, but don't EVER expect me to pay you back in any form, or to thank you, or to even acknowledge what you did, because then there wasn't anything selfless about it, was there?
If you love someone and you've done something for them, good for you. Yay. Move on.
However, life is not usually a choice of act or don't act (help a love one or not). Moreover, when people make selfless decisions, we usually define them as such because the choice is action A or action B (buy a loved one a gift instead of yourself) and action A is objectively more beneficial to the actor (buy oneself a gift) but they still choose action B because the benefits it brings to others and the decision was based on putting others before oneself. In other words by sacrificing act A to do act B, you are right the actor will usually receive some subjective inherent benefit of doing B (it feels good to buy loved ones a gift), but the decision is not made on that basis because A would have made the actor feel even better than B, but the actor made the decision on the basis of putting others needs before their own.
Have you never done something you don't want to do to help someone else?
I think you have to distinguish the case between someone doing a kind deed and feeling good versus someone doing a kind deed because they expect to feel good. Feeling good because you did something good is involuntary and for most people unavoidable. It can be a side-effect of the deed, rather than the cause.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
The Prisoner's dilemma shows quite clearly that there exist problems where, if every agent chases their own interests exclusively, all agents end up in a sub-optimal state.
The whole concept of civilization is based on the willingness of individuals to abide by rules, but it's important to realize that following the rules does not benefit you. You expect to benefit from the rules because you expect that other people will also follow the rules. But you following or not following them has almost no impact on the willingness of others to comply. In short, it is in everyone's interest that as many people as possible abide by the law, but it is in no individual's interest to abide by the law as long as they can avoid being caught.
Society wouldn't work if a large chunk of the population were completely unable to put the interests of the collective above their own interests. We'd all be committing exactly the amount of crime we think we could get away with, everyone would be untrustworthy and corrupt.
It doesn't matter why people are altruistic, or that their reasons are ultimately selfish. Altruism should be respected, selflessness should be praised as a virtue. Selfishness should never, ever be praised as a virtue.
Did you read the article before commenting?
So, it was imaginary?
could seagulls have been making a similar mistake?
Let's hope one day we will be assholes in space.
Plot twist! You know that alien space invaders from the movies, who come to Earth to drain all its resources and go somewhere else? That's us from the future! And the head of the invasion is probably some poor space-fisherman saying "sustainability something blah blah, I have to make a living, you know!".
... kind of combines the old title with the new concep ... eh ... never mind
It's always amazing to me that we have multiple intelligent (how intelligent is uncertain), social species right here on our own planet, and we spend such a tiny fraction of our energies as a society trying to communicate with them.
Source? Also, what does "resident orca" mean in this context?
Do you think we'll ever reach a point where "real" communication would be possible?
Many of the smart things that dogs do are conditioned responses -- they adapt their wiring for pack behavior to human relations and are perceptive about many emotional and other cues.
I believe that whales have been observed performing more complex creative or problem solving tasks, and can probably communicate concepts between whales.
(Seals even rape them :'( http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141117-why-seals-have-sex-w...)
Causing harm to social intelligent species, such as by eating them, is objective. In theory another species could eat plants and also attack mammals for fun all the time. That species would also be assholes. This isn't a judgement based on 'diet', it's a judgement based on how they interact with others.
> since they protect those seals and sea lions
That's not the same logic. The same logic might lead you to call seals and sea lions assholes, but it wouldn't extend to the whales.
I think I know a species that does that.
I think I agree with you 100% based on what I think your comment reveals about your ideas. The point I was trying to make is that it's too often that we judge animal behavior based on our mental constructs, when I think it makes no sense at all even for the most intelligent of the animal species. Somebody pointed out that we are not so different from animals, and so it shouldn't be a big stretch to apply our labels to animal behavior. But I think we are so far from animal behavior that it makes it very difficult to analize/understand it without a really big effort and a long time of study. Scientists get very close, but internet comments are too often narrow-minded. Orcas are not 'killers', at least not more than any other predator. They are very intelligent and gregarious, and they eat other animals. Jumping from this to 'they are assholes' was, in my opinion, not called for. In what 'interaction with others' was this based on? I think a real judge would have a hard time trying to distill intent from animal interactions.
Your second point is completely right. But as a matter of fact, I think that both whales, seals, sea lions and all animals in general are all fine gentlemen. I have my doubts about that monkey pulling the legs (literally, and the tails) of two tigers, though.
Reverse being true; if I was a whale, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to get involve in that human business and become so bitter that I'd lose the drive to be altruist ;-)
Both 'transient' and 'type B' eat marine mammals. Some 'type A' chase cetaceans also. The smaller of all 'Type C' eat fishes. Some species mix in a gradient and things can get very complicated. In the end we could have only one or up to nine species of killer whales here.
The whole experience was unnerving.
In comparison, I once had an old grey whale lift its head out of the water within 3 or 4 feet of that boat and it just gazed at me and my friends for a short while before gently lowering itself and moving off. That boat was only 22 feet long and the grey whale seemed like it was being gentle about being near us.
http://www.inquisitr.com/1827108/great-white-sharks-flee-nep...
So perhaps various other preys have learnt to imitate this distress call in order to gain protection from what are possibly the only animals in the sea capable of fighting an orca.
Or maybe whales just hate orcas and want them to starve.