A new population of blue whales was discovered hiding in the Indian Ocean | Hacker News Reader

A new population of blue whales was discovered hiding in the Indian Ocean

nytimes.com

119 pointsrustoo51 comments

Really hope someone is thinking about the ethics of releasing this information.

In birding for instance, there's often an unwritten rule of obscuring locations of rare species when it's reasonable to think additional traffic would threaten the bird.

I believe that endangered species data in the USA is routinely hidden, due to actual cases of real-estate developers finding and killing the last remaining species in order to clear a development project. Note- college educated American citizens with financial responsibilties have been caught and found guilty of this

Can confirm this is real. It happens with the tiger salamander subspecies we have here blocking developments.

This is a byproduct of the scientifically bankrupt implementation of the endangered species act.

If we as a society care about endangered species, there should be an option to make or improve habitat for such species to offset development.

Humans are bad at curating habitats for other species.

Making or improving habitats for endangered species most effectively involves: leaving them the hell alone.

Getting a construction company to commit to curating (or financing) the habitat for endangered species is a specious political solution that favours continuing with unsustainable construction over essential habitats. I bet there is not a single case where this has been long-term effective.

Where can I read more about this?

In California at least, there is a prohibition on picking carcass of birds and animals even if it’s on your own property. They have to be surrendered to sanitation Dept if in an urban area or fish and game outside city limits.

This is mostly to discourage trade in animals and birds captured for medicinal purposes or for selling to taxidermists looking for specimens. Even roadkill is prohibited.

From what I understand, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act makes it federally illegal in all of America to do nearly anything with even roadkilled birds.

Yeah college educated has been meant ethical. Really that would have been my guess for who would do this sort of thing. Easy to justify on a spot basis.

*never meant

Damn.. talking about being morally bankrupt.

Did Japan sent their scientific mission to investigate yet?

Two points: 1) Japan does not presently hunt blue whales and hasn't for some years. 2) For the past few years Norwegians have killed more whales than the Japanese, yet the Japanese receive the lion's share of criticism for it.

https://iwc.int/total-catches

That Norwegians (and Inuit) hunt whales doesn’t make it any less awful that Japan hunts whales.

In all cases, were talking about killing animals that are known to be highly intelligent and social. Nobody should be killing them.

> In all cases, were talking about killing animals that are known to be highly intelligent and social.

I mean, that applies to plenty of the animals that people breed/hunt for food without outrage.

I'm fond of whales (and rorquals in particular), but my opinion has always been go big or go home. Bar the question of sustainability/conservation, whale hunting isn't inherently any worse than rearing livestock or other regular forms of obtaining meat - personally I think the only rational stances are to oppose all or oppose none.

Cows are highly intelligent and social ... What's the difference?

The table there introduced me to the notion of stinky whales:

https://phys.org/news/2016-10-stinky-whale-whiff-wafts-whali...

Thats terrifying and probably out fault. Who knows how many chemicals are dumped into the ocean that we unknowingly consume because they don’t smell bad.

I have never heard of Norwegians conducting whaling. Why aren't they being reamed for it too?

A significant difference is Norway was only hunting minke whales which are still in the least concern category. Japan however was hunting actually threatened Sperm whales and Fin Whales.

Further, they where doing it under the auspices of research far from Japan vs Norway which was more brazen, but also more local.

PS: Alaskan whale hunting by Inuit also largely gets a free pass.

Inuits taking a few whales a year as a traditional food source is in no way comparable to the commercial endeavors operated by the Japanese.

Per that chart, Japan predominantly hunts minke whales, and last took a single sperm whale in 2013. Indonesia kills approximately 20 sperm whales every year.

Who is it giving the Inuit a pass? Why do they have a say in it? Someone shows up thousands of years after the fact and starts telling the Inuit what they can and can't eat? I don't see that as a defensible position to hold. The Inuit should be able to eat their own whales if they want to.

The Japanese are indigenous to Japan and have been hunting whales for a thousand years and maybe over ten thousand[1] so I guess we don’t get to tell them what they can and can’t eat either.

[1] https://japanwhaling.weebly.com/history.html

Aside from the difference in population between the Japanese and the Inuit, the Japanese are also increasingly disinterested in eating whale meat [1][2]. It appears to be an aspect of their culture which is on the wane (in effect they're telling themselves what to eat), so international pressure on them to stop doesn't strike me as outrageously insensitive.

1: https://www.wired.com/2015/12/japanese-barely-eat-whale-whal...

2: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/11/business/future...

And its actually very high in mercury and cannot be eaten often by young people and women of childbearing age, like other high mercury fish.

Of course, the Ainu are indigenous to Hokkaido https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u_G8L-BIHU

Great. Now leave them alone.

My God, don't tell anyone, we'll find some reason to go kill them...

I doubt they were hiding.

While I thought the same thing, some whales hid from hunters in Iceland[1].

[1]- https://www.idausa.org/campaign/cetacean-advocacy/latest-new...

Does word of killer humans travel within the whale community somehow?

Whales have a large vocabulary, large brains, social structures, and extremely old ages. Many simpler animals communicate dangers, some even have particular words for humans. It's entirely reasonable that whales might have learned at some point that whaling ships were dangerous, maybe even assuming that all ships are dangerous, and then communicate that to other whales, even for a hundred years, which is less than the lifetime of some whales.

So this is why some whales will jump out of water and fall backwards on to kayakers, killing them with their gross tonnage.

Never heard of whale killing a kayaker with a jump. Source?

The linked article says: "Whales are thought to come out of the water to communicate with others, and colliding with boats and kayaks is an accidental consequence of this".

https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2019/02/06/kayaker-s...

Something to consider; why don't orcas ever bite humans in the wild? The standard answer is we're too bony and taste bad. Maybe that's the reason, but it doesn't sit right with me. Sure we might be bony compared to seals, but how do orcas know we taste bad if they won't even take a nibble? Orcas seem to have zero curiosity for how we taste. Contrast this with sharks, which are known for taking a taste once in a while. Are sharks, glorified fish, really more curious than these hyper intelligent mammals? Maybe, but that seems suspect to me.

Here is what I believe; whales are capable of passing knowledge down through their generations, just like us. The power of their language is not yet fully understood, but I think it reasonable to assume they are able to express at least simple ideas like "Can I eat this?", "Do not eat that!" and "Those are dangerous to us." A language which can convey those ideas may be sufficient for whales to have memory of industrial scale whaling. I believe Orcas likely remember that humans are very good at killing whales, and subsequently know not to fuck with us. (They may also be able to reason this out by observing our capabilities today, even if they have forgotten what we once did.)

Eh - most predators don't eat new and weird looking stuff. The reason is, if you can't digest something and get sick, you can't hunt, and so you'll probably die. I think sharks are the weird one here - one factor probably being they're pretty dumb, and the other being they have a pretty tough digestive tract.

They are also cold blooded so it takes longer for a shark to starve.

From what I understand, even among sharks actually trying to eat humans is pretty rare. It happens sometimes with species like tiger sharks (which are pretty widely regarding as being angry at the world), but most other encounters are usually mistaken identity or curiosity.

I like to think of it as ratios; the number of shark "attacks" far outweighs the number of people killed by sharks. Great whites have been known to be like "yum, a seal!", take a bite, go "what the hell is this??" and then let the person go. Except because they're an enormous shark, the person still has a huge chunk taken out of them in the process, not because the shark was actively hunting a person and was fought off.

Whales, on the other hand, have more ways to do this; they seem more willing to brush and nudge and otherwise interact with things before taking a chomp, which can be seen in some of their non-person-in-the-water interactions with boats and people on piers.

Aren't pretty much all warm blooded large land predators known to eat humans on occasion? Bears, tigers, wolves, etc. Perhaps that happens because the opportunity arises more often.

Actually I think the only large warm blooded predator that hunts humans actively is a polar bear. Maybe also leopards? Could be wrong. I think other large mammals typically do it when they're old, infirm, stressed, or otherwise unable to hunt normally.

I think the closest land analogue to orcas is probably wolves, since they also live in packs, which I assume means older/weaker wolves/orcas use their social connections to other pack members to get food. This, I would expect, makes these two sorts of predators less likely to attack humans out of individual desperation. However, although it's rare, groups of wolves attacking humans as prey is not unheard of. Children are particularly at risk from what I understand, since the wolves know they're weaker. (To an orca, I think any human in the water would be weak.)

Grizzly bears also stalk humans.

Oceans don't have monkeys.

Funny how the largest animal on the planet needs to hide.

God I hate news sites that hide behind some kind of localstorage..

You know, just like a population of blue whales who're hiding in the ocean, NYtimes article contents are hiding in somewhere in browser's local storage too

Wait a second. Are you telling me their paywall works by downloading the content to my browser and then hiding it? That would be ... ridiculous.

Hide and seek champions of 2020?

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