Killer Whales: 'Transient' Orcas Are Thriving | Hacker News Reader

Killer Whales: 'Transient' Orcas Are Thriving

theatlantic.com

74 pointsColinWright71 comments

"Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons." Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

This is an issue that gets repeated through history over and over again. The group that develops tech, ends up totally screwing over the group that doesn't. So while, before the encounter the group that did not develop the tech, may have a better quality of life, once they encounter each other, the group without the tech gets screwed over.

For example, dolphins and orcas have been screwed over by humans whether getting captured and sent to live in tanks, or entangled in fishing nets, or having their food sources over fished.

It happens in the human realm too. A big example is the the Spanish Conquistadors and the Native Americans. Prior to them meeting, the Native Americans probably had a better quality of life than the Spaniards. But after the meeting, they got totally screwed over.

> A big example is the the Spanish Conquistadors and the Native Americans. Prior to them meeting, the Native Americans probably had a better quality of life than the Spaniards. But after the meeting, they got totally screwed over.

That had nothing to do with technology levels. The native Americans were wiped out by novel diseases. The conquistadors were helped greatly by the based-on-fact rumours of people dying a while after coming into contact with them. Factionalism and partisanship, various groups thinking they could use the chaos to grab power, made things worse too.

Even Columbus screwed over the Indians on the islands, even before disease had a chance to wreak havoc. Just the fact that they sailed in ships, wore armor, and had steel swords and rudimentary firearms gave a huge advantage to the Spanish.

It’s an interesting alternative history idea though - what if the disease pressure was flipped but the technology was left as is?

You had something like this during the European partitioning of Africa into colonial Empires. Africa was known as the “white man’s graveyard” due to various tropical diseases. In the end, for the most part, technology won, and Europe carved up Africa into various colonial Empires.

But it did take 400 years more technology than what Cortez had. The Zulu army was not a walk-over in the mid-19th C, although 50 years later (with gatling guns) it would have been.

Europeans hardly acted like saints, but it's still true that orders of magnitude more natives - perhaps as many as 90% - were killed by disease than by direct action of the colonists.

I highly recommend the book 1491 by Charles Mann which talks about this (and much else). He explains how scientific estimates of the pre-Colombian population of the Americas keep getting revised upwards as we discover more evidence of just how many natives were wiped out by disease. It took Europeans hundreds of years to explore the entire continent; by the time they arrived in, say, the American West, the land was largely empty and the Indian population was very low. Only more recently have we started to figure out that European diseases spread through the continent much faster than European settlers did. It's likely that some of these "sparsely populated" areas were in fact much more populated in 1492, but the population collapsed through disease many generations before Europeans came into contact.

I don't think we can fault Europeans too severely for this; the germ theory of disease wasn't understood until the late 19th century, and Europeans suffered greatly from epidemics too (when Colombus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 it was only about 150 years after the Black Death had killed a third of the population of the Europe.) But it's a fascinating book, and it's mysterious and sad to think that so many complex societies were devastated and erased while leaving so little trace of their existence.

No no! white people bad and evil! 1619 project!!!

Even without germ theory Europe still used diseased blankets for attempted genocide on at least one documented instance in 1763. https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smal...

Excerpts: Amherst wrote on July 16, 1763, "P.S. You will Do well to try to Inocculate the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could take Effect,..." Bouquet replied on July 26, 1763, "I received yesterday your Excellency's letters of 16th with their Inclosures. The signal for Indian Messengers, and all your directions will be observed." Smallpox was highly contagious among the Native Americans, and — together with measles, influenza, chicken pox, and other Old World diseases — was a major cause of death since the arrival of Europeans and their animals.[27][28][29] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_biological_warfare

What’s interesting about this is it wasn’t clear it actually worked. However, the approach suggests a better understanding of disease spread than a lack of germ theory would suggest. Plenty of evidence suggests biological warfare was common across European history. The last known incident of using plague corpses for biological warfare occurred in 1710, when Russian forces attacked the Swedes by flinging plague-infected corpses over the city walls of Reval (Tallinn).[18] However, during the 1785 siege of La Calle, Tunisian forces flung diseased clothing into the city.[17]

Yes, Europeans had some general idea that disease was contagious, but that doesn't contradict anything I said. Smallpox blankets were used at least once and this was obviously terrible and should be condemened, as should the Aztecs' widespread practice of human sacrifice and the Iroquois's well-documented history of slavery and torture. Humans are great at being shitty to each other.

It's still true that far, far more native Americans were killed by European disease than through any deliberate act of European volition, and that's a fact that sits separately from any moral judgements we might make about anything.

That’s true on the surface, but there was a ~300 year gap between 1472 and 1763. By 1600 contact was widespread which should have been plenty of time to spread disease. https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-rec...

So, native populations should have had time to develop immunity to European diseases. At even 2.5% annual population growth rate a population recovers from a 90% population drop in under 100 years.

https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-rec...

Thus either disease was vastly more devastating than just 90%, genocide by Europeans was very intentional across generarions, or some other effect was in play.

> At even 2.5% annual population growth rate a population recovers from a 90% population drop in under 100 years.

Then the population growth was obviously lower than 2.5%. That was partly due to European oppression of course, although the worst (U.S.) American crimes against the Indians didn't come until the 18th and 19th centuries (the Indian Removal Act/Trail of Tears being a particularly notorious example.)

No-one disputes that the overwhelming majority of the pre-Colombian population of the Americas was killed by infectious diseases in the decades immediately after contact. Jared Diamond is just one anthropologist who puts the figure at 90%. [0] It took the population of Europe 200 years [1] to recover its previous levels after the Black Death killed "only" 30 to 50% of its population.

If you read Diamond and Mann, there are some interesting explanations for why Native Americans were so susceptible to European diseases, much more so than in the other direction. Two big factors were that 1) Europeans had spent centuries living in much more densely-populated, interconnected, dirty and unhygienic towns and cities, so they'd already been exposed to more disease and thus had more immunity (although not total immunity as I'll discuss below). And 2) Native Americans were descended from a very small number of people - possibly just 4 or 5 waves of a few hundred people each - who originally crossed the Bering Strait from Asia, and this ancestral bottleneck meant they had far less genetic diversity than Africans/Euarasians, meaning that if a disease could kill one of them it could likely kill very many of them.

(Incidentally, syphilis is thought to be one of the few diseases that travelled the other direction in the Colombian exchange, i.e. it's thought to have originated in the Americas then spread to Eurasia.)

> So, native populations should have had time to develop immunity to European diseases.

It's not really that simple; diseases like smallpox were devastating all throughout history, even after thousands of years of "time to develop immunity". Many, many European settlers of the Americas were killed by smallpox epidemics; just go to [2] and ctrl+F "smallpox". What neutralised the threat of these diseases was vaccination, which didn't become widespread until the 20th century. We're so used to living in a post-vaccine world that we forget just how commonplace and devastating infectious disease used to be to all populations everwhere. (Although, of course, the events of the last year have helped to remind us.)

[0] https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html [1] https://www.ancient.eu/Black_Death/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

2.5% growth rate is slow when the population is young, space and food is abundant, and birth control is non existent.

European recovery was faster and much more complex than that after the Black Death. Europe’s population was 78.7 million in 1300, 70.7 million in 1350, and back to 78.1 million in 1400. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography A closer look into the numbers shows 80% recovery was quite fast even in areas that where devastated, but after that wars etc knocked the population back down.

It’s the classic S curve where growth is exponential up to carrying capacity and slows as you approach it.

As to immunity, I am referring to individual immunity from exposure and survival not genetic immunity. Europe never became immune to smallpox, but by exposing people young they are much more capable of fighting off infections. COVID deaths for people 35-44 are 10x that of people aged 5-14. We don’t think of 35-44 year olds as a high risk group because it just keeps getting dramatically worse as people age. 45-54 year olds are more than twice as likely to die as people 10 years younger. It more than doubles again 55-64, and by 65+ your in the high risk groups.

Loads of them were intentionally killed by the Europeans.

Far far more were killed by other native groups, groups either hired or who saw the coming of europeans as an opportunity to topple the dominant group.

Divide and conquer. It's a classic technique.

Or liberate and enlist. Some of these tribes were what we would today call 'oppressed peoples'.

> The group that develops tech, ends up totally screwing over the group that doesn't.

That's how natural selection created us. If we have a biological or technical advantage, we use it to a large extent, enough to put our species (or group) at a strategic advantage, which allows us to grow faster. If we didn't use it, we wouldn't advance as much. That's hardly a problem, it's just life.

Natural selection would make people help each others, not killing each others.

> For example, dolphins and orcas have been screwed over by humans whether getting captured and sent to live in tanks, or entangled in fishing nets, or having their food sources over fished.

Don't google Japanese dolphin slaughter if you are squeamish.

Later citation. Iirc that line is originally from the radio drama. The books came later.

I believe orcas should be at the top of the list in terms of being granted human level species rights. They should be removed from tanks ASAP and placed in sanctuaries, such as the one being built in Nova Scotia.

I also have a suspicion that orca intelligence possibly matches that of humans.

Assuming most animals experience similar emotions in much the same way as humans, why is it okay to inflict pain and suffering only on the less intelligent animals, but not the more intelligent ones?

Does harming them make you uncomfortable because you have an easier time relating to them? Or is it because they are possibly intelligent enough to blame humans for what we've been doing to them, and that makes you uncomfortable?

Either way, intelligence can't be bar to use, because that argument would exclude mentally retarded humans from enjoying human rights as well.

That may sound harsh, but I strongly believe humanity should stop and think on the why for a moment.

Are we doing something because it is right, because the alternative makes us feel bad, or because doing so will make us look better? The first motivation is altruistic, the other is egoistic, and the last egotistic. Do all three align in this case? What about other examples?

I imagine even reflecting on one's own motivations will be uncomfortable to some. It certainly was to me.

Edit: Also I don't believe any of these motivations are inherently bad, but often one is dishonest about which one it really is.

Your questions address or imply things I didn’t say, and you’re making a lot of assumptions.

I don’t really feel like debating in this manner, so all I will say is that I have a problem with any animal being mentally, physically, or emotionally abused, neglected, etc. by humans, regardless of intelligence.

> why is it okay to inflict pain and suffering only on the less intelligent animals?

I don't think anyone argues that it's okay to inflict pain and suffering on animals. We do inflict pain and suffering on factory-farmed animals, but most people oppose it (at least in a half-assed verbal manner; people say they don't like it but still buy products made in that way, in the same way people say they care about slavery and racism and inequality and exploitation of the third world but don't change their consumer behaviour to avoid supporting those things.)

That's because consumers don't have any power to stop it. I wish people would stop with the whole "if only people cared enough to vote with their wallet". We've got hundreds of years of evidence that it does not work. If you want change that doesn't benefit corporations, you've got to do it through the government.

I agree government is the most efficient way (at least a non-corrupted one), but people do have a choice and they do vote with their wallet, I see it every time I do shopping.

Anytime they opt for cheap chicken meat instead of at least free range one, any time they buy cheap crappy farmed salmon instead of wild catched one, they say loud and clear they just couldn't care less. People that buy cheap fruits instead of BIO ones. And so on.

Stop acting like mankind is a bunch of saints oppressed by evil corporations, we are often lazy and oblivious when it suits us and can come up with endless stream of excuses for why so.

When salaries haven't kept up with inflation for something like 30 years, it's perfectly understandable for people to buy the cheaper option. For many families it's not really about choice, but survival.

In fact buying everything bio/organic, free-range, artisanal, etc is sometimes just used for wealth-signalling.

At the end of the day you could also just go vegan/vegetarian, which also happens to be way cheaper than meat.

Again with the "why don't you just..."

It doesn't work. A few people choosing to go vegetarian or vegan changes nothing. Something like 80% of people who try it revert to meat within a year. It's the same with people choosing to stop driving. If you try it you'll just notice nobody else gives a shit and you're making this huge sacrifice while they continue to have fun. Anything like this can only work if we all do it together.

This wasn't about "why dont' you just", the entire thread you're replying to was about whether or not people have a choice and can vote with their wallets.

I argue they do.

> It's the same with people choosing to stop driving.

Depends on where you live. If there is good public transport infrastructure, more people may decide not to drive.

I don't even own a car, and not because of some environmental reasoning, but because it's more of a hassle than it's worth. I fully understand that this is not possible if ones lives in the US however.

So instead of prying people from their cars, the solution is probably to have good alternatives.

However not every indulgence has good alternatives.

And lastly, it's not the same. Your comparison is completely disingenuous. You may need a car. It is a utility. But you don't need meat.

> If you try it you'll just notice nobody else gives a shit and you're making this huge sacrifice while they continue to have fun.

If it is your stated belief that it is wrong to eat certain meat, and you do so anyways, you're just a massive hyprocrite. What others are doing doesn't even factor into it. Justifying your own behavior with what someone else is doing is just whataboutism.

Do the sanctuaries actually work?

I recall reading that they would seal out humans

I don’t know because I don’t think they’ve really been tried. The sanctuary in Nova Scotia, to my understanding, is huge and is supposed to help rehabilitate previously captive whales and house them forever. Captive whales are unlikely to survive out in the wild on their own (maybe, I don’t know), and so the project is to give them a natural home instead of being in concrete tanks.

https://whalesanctuaryproject.org

> I also have a suspicion that orca intelligence possibly matches that of humans.

I thought similar things after watching the documentary Blackfish (which is excellent.) Some of the orca behaviour documented in that film - in captivity and in the wild - is remarkably intelligent; some of the most obviously-intelligent behaviour I've seen from any non-human animal.

I would argue that the accessibility of seeing these magnificent creatures in a SeaWorld or equivalent has done a lot to help the environment by educating people and making them familiar with something precious. Children who visit zoos and aquariums cherish the animal kingdom and grow up supporting environmental protections. Yes it is terrible for the affected orcas given how social they are - but I am not sure I agree the whole practice is a net negative.

I would ask that you read the following articles and still see if you feel the same way. The southern resident orcas were decimated by the attack and capture of many orcas in the 70s, and the effects are still present today. Lolita, the last remaining orca from that capture is still alive, trapped in a concrete prison barely the size of a public pool. She’s been alone in that tank for decades. Her last tank partner committed suicide by repeatedly ramming his head into the side of the tank, causing a brain hemorrhage.

You seem to be advocating that torture of the few could help the many, but that has not been the case. The southern resident orcas, those that primarily seeded entertainment orcas in the U.S., are potentially nearing extinction.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-or...

http://www.orcanetwork.org/Main/index.php?categories_file=Lo...

https://www.king5.com/mobile/article/news/local/orca-capture...

SRKs are a special case but their recent low figures and troubles with calves seem mostly unrelated to those past captures and more related to issues like the lack of food, the use of sonar (nearby naval bases), boat noise, runoff from Seattle, and other issues (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_resident_killer_wha...). I get that the past captures reduced their numbers, which increases the risk of this community of whales disappearing, but it seems the lack of subsequent growth/recovery is due to other factors.

Orcas as a whole (the species not specific pods) aren’t marked as endangered and number in the tens of thousands. The SRKs are endangered and that’s terrible but I would say the overall orca species and even other marine life benefit from greater awareness and consideration from people having been able to appreciate them directly in places like SeaWorld.

Orcas are matriarchal, have extremely close family units, and rely on the leadership of older orcas. Killing or capturing orcas that would now be older orcas, particularly females, has had huge effects on the southern resident population.

Where do you draw the line?

Ants are very intelligent. Is it okay to destroy their societies just because they don't look pretty and we can't emphasize with arthropods?

The residents are starving to death and the governments around the salish sea seem to be uninterested in doing anything to address this. It's incredibly depressing.

My partner works with DFO and it’s pretty complicated. Everyone cares, it’s just a political nightmare.

Not many people with careers at DFO don’t care about the ocean or its inhabitants. It’s just so hard to enact change.

Real knowledge of what’s going on and what effective solutions would be is surprisingly lacking too. We know industry doesn’t help, such as fishing, shipping, and transport, but these are virtually impossible to change positively in the short term.

I'm sure many on the ground at DFO cares but yeah there's no political leadership to do anything to prevent the seemingly inevitable extinction of residents.

No political will to cancel fishing. No political will to halt TMX, etc.

Jobs > *

Yeah, this is my assessment as well. It's quite demoralizing for several people I know working in sciences at DFO. When you have a PhD in a science and can't use it as it's intended because money matters more than the thing you study, it gets difficult to deal with on a day to day basis. It's not a trivial thing to get to that point in a career, but you, your knowledge, and your potential are completely kneecapped when it comes to most jobs competing with the well-being o the environment.

The leadership I do know of from second-hand information is hyper-focused on organization performance - they couldn't be further from the sciences, and they actively work to suppress science at times.

In fact, there's very compelling evidence of a significant factor in reduced salmon population, but that research was initially muzzled by the Harper administration, and since then, the findings were revealed but the research more or less put on hold. Some action was taken based on the research (shutting down salmon aquaculture near spawning rivers), but it's decades late and a decade later than the research came out.

Then we have the evidence that hatcheries put incredibly small amounts of harvestable biomass into the ocean while deteriorating salmon genetics. Salmon are evolved to thrive in their specific spawning territories at a critical, vunerable point in their life cycle; by muddying those genes, you can make it so they lose what gave them the ability to thrive at all. Meanwhile, hatcheries are so established and commonly believed to be so effective and it's exceedingly unlikely to see them go anywhere any time soon. We celebrate the addition of a hatchery but we may have been undermining salmon this entire time.

I could go on. It's a very sad situation and very close to my family and heart. Tomorrow I'm going to go free diving and soak it all in. I like to appreciate the beauty while it's still here and remind myself how important it all is.

It’s also tough to change things. Reviving an ecosystem end to end to create viable salmon populations for orcas is tough. For example, some believe all the dams on rivers where chinook salmon swim should be breached, which is controversial (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-el...). Maybe we need to just release farm raised fish into the sea to sustain the orcas until then?

But I do agree the governments (and people) don’t care. Seattle is a problem because it is a big dense population that brings a disproportionate, concentrated impact to the Puget Sound - everything ranging from opioids in the marine food chain to dumping raw sewage directly into those waters. It’s a city that professes environmental culture but doesn’t do much about it, because it would be too inconvenient to admit that it’s very existence is a problem (as opposed to more distributed populations in sustainable balance with their environment).

Fun fact: despite being an apex predator, there are no recorded human fatalities from orcas in the wild.

That's because humans don't go swimming where Orcas hang out trying to find something to eat.

Actually, lots do, and the transients eat mammals.

I think they're smart enough to differentiate the ones (us) that would cause too many problems to eat.

In our area (Discovery Islands), there is no lack of humans swimming, or in kayaks, or diving. The transients are common here, far more than the residents. Of course, so are seals and sea lions.

Yes but I can all but guarantee you that humans aren't swimming where there have been known orca sightings.

people dive near wild orcas all the time.

Swimming and diving with orcas is not just regularly done, it's so common and safe that it's something which is offered as a guided tourist activity in Norway. (I personally know someone who went on such a trip.)

Sharks rarely attack humans too, despite the popularity of Jaws. I was always taught that sharks generally only bother to attack humans when they mistake us for another animal.

Most apex predators that people think of don't really attack humans. The ones that do are rare exceptions and are often found to be injured or outcast so unable to hunt normal prey. The biggest killer in Africa is the hippo but they're herbivores and just protecting their territory or something. Bears are one of the few that always see humans as food.

Maybe because we have less calories than, say, a whale. They should have done the math.

Kind of ironic that the author used a whale watching tour to observe the Orcas. These tours are disruptive to resident Orca populations(non-transient).

What’s the tjr225 compliant way of observing Orcas?

We don't yet have the technology. But where there is a will there is a way. If we could derive ad money from Orca observation, I'm sure our bright minds will come up with something this decade. Or OAAS.

I'm actually working on a side project called Whalebernetes which will allow you to orchestrate groups of virtual Orcas to perform tasks like gather salmon or seals. These Orca groups, or Pods can then be moved between various Oceans as-needed depending on the needs of your business.

That sounds promising. Watch out, you'll also need some way to get those pods to stay where you need them, like to dock them with a harbour.

I imagine one day, if your idea really takes off, we could abstract away our fisheries activities almost entirely (for most businesses), simply doing our fishing in "The Foam". (The Foam is really just other people's water)

Maybe someday they could be viewed from an innocuous object with cameras installed. Like the remote controlled elephant dung pile cam:

https://youtu.be/LCqaFvc7rDw

There is long range infra-red: https://www.mmo-association.org/infrared

I'm involved in setting something up like this in Australian waters.

The post was noting the irony of the article- not my personal ethics. But sure if it makes you that self conscious I’ll go there: there really isn’t one aside from getting lucky from the shore or some sort of sustainable fishing vessel.

The GP was just poking fun. Getting defensive and suddenly asserting a bold, moral stance without evidence, seems a bit thin-skinned to me.

FWIW, I read this paper which says that whale-watching is not unethical provided certain protocols are observed.

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jmb/2012/807294/

I don’t really care what the GP was doing. Tourists come to the puget sound and fuel an economy of boats that swarm an ostensibly endangered group of local whales. Why would I care what a person who thinks that is funny thinks?

There are seventy five resident orcas in the puget sound. Seventy five. Their lives are disrupted by 100 years of industrialization and we’ll be lucky if they’re here in 2121.

For what it’s worth I went on a whale watching tour a few years ago. I regret it.

There are several marine parks that have dolphins and/or orcas. It's probably better from the orcas' utilitarian perspective to go there where it's contained than to add on demand to the intrusions on the wild populations.

   Who cares about nature, spends a week camping / hiking.  Nature is awesome!

It’s easier to get people to care if they have some level of hands on involvement.

Wife has taught kids that have never seen an ocean. Despite living a mile from the ocean. To those kids it was a concept, not meaningful.

I wrote a blog post [1] partly about why the answer to this is not whale watching.

[1] https://medium.com/@pc.peterso/why-seaworld-must-be-saved-75...

Are whale watching tours more disruptive to orcas then other regular boat traffic? The tours in California are required to stay a safe distance from marine mammals.

Some of the larger whale boats in my area (CA) are very loud, and I can hear their droning miles away when I'm kayaking - there's dozens of these boats. They cooperate with each other to find the whales, so I assume it's a constant pestering presence. I think it might be more reasonable if they were restricted to weekends only.

It was eerily peaceful out on the water for the several months the whale boats were shut down due to covid.

One of the best articles I've read in a long time.

Is this an article or a novel? I lost patience before getting to the point.

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