Comment by dj_mc_merlin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dj_mc_merlin | Hacker News Reader

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Fair point about the no known attacks. There's stories about orcas killing humans in many cultures that historically interacted with killers whales.

> I believe you're over-estimating their intelligence.

One of my favourite orca stories is the killers of Eden[0]. The wiki page is short and worth a read, but to summarize: a pod of whales learns to herd whales into a bay and alert humans to them. Humans harpoon them and the pod helps drag them back by pulling on the ropes. The carcass is left overnight for the pod, that eats its lips and tongue. Afterwards, the humans haul it back.

Why would the orcas alert the humans unless they realized that the humans were responsible for the harpooning? Furthermore, just the act of slapping the river with water to attract attention is already quite advanced. And why did they only eat part of the whale (and always the same part)? Why did they never eat the humans?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...

I'm not trying to say that orcas aren't intelligent, they certainly are. We can cooperate with them, and they understand things, much like other dolphins do. If they weren't, you couldn't train them.

I don't believe they're "if you eat that guy over there, the navy will come and hunt us down" smart though.

They don't need to have such a clear idea of the consequences to realize it's a bad idea. Not antagonizing entities stronger than you are is a pretty basic instinct.

> Not antagonizing entities stronger than you are is a pretty basic instinct.

See, something insects don't get.

Insects are stronger in number. That you kill one that is biting you or buzzing around your head doesn't matter.

Stealing food from humans and annoying them is a very easy way to get food for wasps. But if they do it for long enough, the humans might decide to find their nest and eradicate the entire colony. The suggestion in this thread is that orcas are intelligent enough to realize (on any level of consciousness) this being a possibility for them if they start to harm (or even just annoy) humans.

They'd need a pretty abstract idea of strength though. The individual human isn't stronger than them at all, so they'd need to deduct that the fact that humans are using tools probably means they can also build weapons etc.

Since manual whaling hasn't happened for quite a while, they'd need to communicate abstract concepts to their offspring to keep the memory alive. It's one thing to demonstrate to them how to synchronize dives to create a wave and flush a seal off of an ice sheet, it's quite another to explain the process of humans hunting them with ships and harpoons and indicating that humanity's technology has progressed.

They have language we haven't decoded yet. Even if their language is very simple, it could suffice for this. A young orca calf could say "Food?" and receive the response "NO!" They could then repeat this to future generations.

In a sense, yes, but not a prohibitive one. Boats and fishing equipment are obviously tools that orcas are familiar with. They would basically see fishing equipment in particular as weapons already. These are things that orcas know they can't build. They're weird and scary in at least the sense that bats and aliens are weird to us. It's not a huge abstract leap from that to "let's not mess with these guys".

Think about how you feel approaching a very large animal, like a horse you don't know. You don't need to know how or even if it can hurt you, but it's worth being careful. If you know the animal has sharp points (like a large dog), even more so. I think sparrows avoid cars by similar logic.

I really think non-verbal, subconscious intelligence is capable of a lot more abstraction than people think. We need language to describe it, but not to do it. "Threat" is an abstraction that lots of simple animals handle just fine. It's not so much that we need to give animals more credit than that we give ourselves too much. Our actual motivations are usually much simpler than the stories we tell ourselves.

Absolutely. I am scared of spiders because my mother is scared of spiders, not because she told me to be scared of spiders. Quite the opposite: knowing arachnaphobia is an irrational fear (at least in the UK), she tried very hard not to pass it on to her children, but the body language of fear must be near impossible to hide from a child.

Spiders are actually a really good example of this principle.

What's really interesting here is the problem of just a "naive threat estimation", which usually is always just estimating the purely mechanical danger the body of a foe could pose. We have a healthy respect for large animals like horses and cattle that could crush us. We've got an open fear of predators with obvious sharp teeth and such (wolves, big cats, crocodilians). But bugs? Bugs are really weird because they're not mechanically dangerous, and as, say, a child, sizing them up, there's no sensible reason to be scared.

I find it really interesting how - even without necessarily understanding that they've got poison, we as a species do a really good job of being scared of "things that aren't visually obvious threats" like this - especially in kids, who really struggle to "get it" when it comes to what's actually dangerous about, say, a spider or a jellyfish.

I think you really hit on something there - I think a little bit of it is actually a built-in instinctual fear, but there's also a huge part that's an imitative fear kids pick up from anything that the body language of a parent conveys as dangerous.

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