Animation of a blue whale trying to avoid ships | Hacker News Reader

Animation of a blue whale trying to avoid ships

independent.co.uk

147 points3super388 comments

I believe I saw this on reddit last week and I feel it's disingenuous. It's sped up and meant to make it look like the whale is frantically trying to escape while being hemmed in by ships, but a more plausible explanation is that the whale is attracted to the wakes of the passing ships.

This speaks to some kind of phenomenon that creates a feeding opportunity for the whale.

Perhaps a marine biologist can speak more intelligently to this.

I took a ferry once, and the Seagulls followed the ship and prayed on the fish stirred up to the surface by the ships propeller. This is a very plausible explanation.

If the whale would want to follow a ship he would do that. Instead the pattern looks more like he bounces off as soon as he comes close to a ship. Looks more like he wants to avoid ships.

Seagulls on the other hand, have a very different pattern. They also use ships to rest on them and tend to travel along side.

I am not a marine biologist, but worked in VFX: Of course this is sped up, watching those ships travel their routes in realtime would be a bit like watching paint dry.

Certain aspects/patterns of movement will only become visible when the playback speed is changed (early 20th century theorist Walter Benjamin called this the Optical-Unconscious). So e.g. it is easier to judge patterns in the traffic flow of vehicles in a sped up video than in real time footage. Both display the same movement but something else becomes visible.

The choice of speed seems consciously intended to make it seem more frantic than it is. It's too fast to make out what's going on. If they played it half speed, it would be closer to reality and also easier to see and understand, so why is it this fast?

Or this was the speed things came out when converted to video.

I think attributing this to malice is really not a great move, given that we can only guess here and a lot of people without advanced video knowledge wouldn't make this a conscious choice unless it is much too slow or fast

Another simple hypothesis: a frantic-looking animation is more likely to get upvoted on Reddit so if 5 people posted animations at different speeds, a frantic-looking one might have a better chance at surviving

I often default to arguments like this. But I make an exception when the mistake is both inaccurate and seems to favor the conclusion chosen by the author. They should have realized this and slowed the video to avoid even the appearance of attempting to create a false implication. In my opinion.

That's why I say "seems" instead of "was". I don't want to assume it's on purpose. But I'm sure they had control over the speed of the animation. If they didn't make it look frenetic on purpose, they were incompetent in their attempt to make it describe reality.

If they didn't mean it to seem that way, the responsibility is on them to fix it. This is only my opinion, but I'm sure I'm not alone.

What's your opinion on weather map/satellite images then? You are aware they're not real time and the storms/wind isn't actually moving that fast?

Are the people who make them incompetent? Or would they simply be useless if played back in real time - since you would hardly be able to see any movement at all.

Wow, not sure if I'm being unclear, but I'll try again. This specific animation is issued at a speed that I think is faster than is useful. I think it is more useful and interesting to see the detailed interaction between the whale and an individual boat at a granular level. As played, you see the whale ping pong around between ships, but it's hard to get much of a sense for what is going on. I can't think of another reason for the video being that speed except that they want to imply that the whale is panicked (also the subtext of the study, so not exactly a complete stretch), or that it was an actual oversight that just so happened to make a covert emotional argument that favors their conclusion, which I consider a scientific faux pas.

If you speed up a video of pedestrians at cross-walks it suddenly becomes pedestrians running across the street to avoid being run over by cars going way too fast.

Half speed... so we take half a week to watch it?

Sure playing it at half speed works be closer to real life. But playing a week sped up to 90s isn't going to be much different.

I'd much rather see focus on the whale and its interaction with individual ships. This doesn't show any of that nuance at all, and I don't know why. (But I have ideas)

How do you explain the 50km wakes?

They are not wakes, but speed indicators. I guess there was a choice to represent speed with length bars, as opposed to with color or numbers. Although I would expect length bars to be a natural choice made by a data scientists who is used to think of vectors as a bar with a length and a direction.

They aren't speed indicators, like how you would represent a vector field (e.g. in a quiver plot). If they were they would always be straight lines, and probably be arrows that point in the direction of travel.

The look like wakes. People will assume they are wakes.

This was explained in the Twitter thread[1].

https://twitter.com/NiklasAstrand/status/1358321916369592321

The result here is that the whale's motion looks frantic, whether it is or not. We can't even tell whether the whale is really interacting with the ships, or interacting with their wake, whether it is really avoiding, or giving chase.

A better solution would be to fast forward (faster) through the uninteresting parts and play the interesting parts close to real-time.

You seem to be missing the point of the OP wittingly. It's inconsequential that playing the animation at its normal speed would be a bad idea, what is also important is the effect it will have on an average reader of the Independence, the most obvious impression is that the whale is running for its life, which makes this disingenuous.

I don't know enough about how whales perceive time, distance and the unnatural disturbances coming in with the speed of sound in water to know whether the playback speed is misleading in reflecting the whales feelings or not.

The "obvious impression" you are talking about might not be as obvious as you think it is. For me at least it helped in seeing two interesting patterns: whale roams around and seems to change direction when a ship drives into it's path. Sometimes though it seems to go specifically into the area where a ship "just" drove through.

What was clear to me is that that dot would move differently without ships around it.

I saw it too there.

Another commented suggested that it actually might be following to these points/paths as the ship stirs krill or used as distance markers or something. I don't really know if I believe that and haven't had a chance to read the associated study. To be fair, the ocean is a big place so I am a bit skeptical overall.

I do know though, anything from the independent.co.uk URL is almost guarenteed to be heavily sensationalized. Always the most outlandish and emotional headlines. So if it's running here, my first instinct is to just move along.

The ocean is a big place but the animation is a congested area near Chile about 35x35 miles.

I've never sailed the golf of Ancud but in the summer on Long Island Sound in a sailboat you might have to change course 5-10 times a day or more due to traffic, and there not a lot of it.

If you don't see the informal lanes and you're trying to keep away from boats, you could spend the day taking evasive action.

My location relative to other boats is the top thing on my mind out there.

The conditions the encourage whale feeding and an analysis of current models for whale movement was the purpose of the study was discussed in the study that collected the data the animation is based on.

Our current best understanding is that whales are drawn to the region due to a thermal fronts in the water and concentrations of chlorophyll (from their food source) that make it easy for the whales to feed efficiently.

If this is a topic that you are curious about, give reading the study a try. I don't think "armchair science" from people that don't bother to read the source material adds much value to any discussion.

> ...and I feel it's disingenuous.

I think you're probably right. Unfortunately that does accurately sum up the quality of reporting in The Independent pretty well.

Every newspaper in the UK has an axe to grind but, in terms of torturing the facts to suit a particular narrative, The Independent is right up there with The Daily Mail and The Express. All of them are really shoddy publications that thoughtful human beings would do well to avoid.

I also am not a marine biologist but your explanation sounds more plausible to me, especially given the size of the area represented on that map. The whale is covering pretty large distances and it's quite clear that a bunch of those movements, and oddly a lot of those where the motion seems to speed up, may well not be triggered at all by the distant movement of ships, or could just as well be it trying to catch up to ships.

Are there any reputable news publications you read? Subscription required is fine.

Unfortunately I can't answer that with a strong "yes". I've been considering the FT, based on a couple of recommendations (one of which was on here), but you have to go in with your eyes open: it does lean right. Newsweek isn't too bad, and the fact that it's a weekly does give it at least the sense of a bit more distance and objectivity.

The BBC is supposed to be balanced and unopinionated but they implement it in the most passive-aggressive way imaginable. What I mean by that is that sometimes their coverage simply has massive holes in it, which makes it very hard to keep abreast of unfolding events (bear in mind I don't watch the TV channels, only look at the news website). I presume that's because they won't report on something if it would give them impression of bias, but it can be pretty frustrating.

A recent example is the attack on the US Capitol: the BBC's coverage was constantly out of date, missing tons of key information. CNN, The Guardian, plenty of other news sites across the political spectrum, and even Twitter (!) were better sources of information.

Basically the BBC, at present, implements the letter of its charter whilst completely ignoring its spirit. Super-annoying.

Disclaimer: Not a marine biologist by trade but took several classes and have close friends in the profession.

What people do not realize is that these whales communicate by sound and have very sensitive hearing. Boats, especially the larger ones you see being used for fishing/shipping generate a lot of noise due to powerful engines and underwater cavitation caused by their propeller spinning. This can drown out whales communications between pods. Researchers are not sure what the long term ramifications of this will be but have observed whales avoiding shipping lanes[0]. It worries me how other marine life, which we do not have the same resources or public support to track, reacts to this.

Lastly, here is a video of a scuba diver underneath a freighter to give an idea of what goes on underwater. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIPMfHUIVvk

[0]https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/shipping-lanes-are-getti...

I was trying to think of an analogy and came up with this: imagine trying to complete grocery shopping in a large store except all the other shoppers are blasting air horns constantly. Of course, you avoid them but it does not matter which aisle you escape to, another shopper will enter and you will need to find another place to avoid the sound. Its a weird analogy but is the closest to normal life I can come up with.

> Boats, especially the larger ones you see being used for fishing/shipping generate a lot of noise due to powerful engines and underwater cavitation caused by their propeller spinning.

A couple of things. First, that video shows you how relatively quiet the ships are unless you are right underneath the back. You can’t even hear the engine noise towards the front of the ship (which is likely why a ship the size of a city block snuck up on a scuba diver).

Second, propellers on those ships don’t cavitate unless they are misconfigured. Cavitation is inefficient and causes vibration the shipping companies are absolutely incentivized to eliminate.

There are many problems with commercial shipping (the pollution, etc), but the noise is not realistically one of them.

The much bigger noise problem is sonar.

Sound travels differently underwater. A diver senses every sound as if the source is from their own head and all sound sort of blends into one. A whale has a much easier time distinguishing different auditory signals underwater then a diver does. Furthermore, a whale can probably sense the direction the sound comes from and how fast it is moving. A diver failing to notice a giant ship is no evidence that a whale will.

The video was meant to show how loud ships were. It did not.

That diver did not have the ship sneak up on him, he was diving in a shipping channel and knew there would be a ship coming up. He prepared by staying next to the large chain on the bottom and holding onto it so he would not be sucked into the propeller. In addition, the reason the ship did not sound "loud" to you is the way gopro records audio. Had this been recorded with a calibrated hydrophone the noise would have been off the charts.

I agree with you the bigger problem is sonar but I hold my opinion the whale in the video swims how it does because it is avoiding the sound of these ships, it is not acting on sight or attracted to wakes/ plankton.

> It's sped up and meant to make it look like the whale is frantically trying to escape while being hemmed in by ships,

When I watched the video at full speed I thought: this whale doesn't give a damn if there are other ships nearby

When I watched the video at 1/10 speed my opinion didn't change. Except the video was boring. You are reading too much into this video.

I witnessed an interesting phenomenon : invariably when information is presented from some article that hints at either animal intelligence or harmful influence of humans on animals, some armchair commentator will come forward with an alternate explanations that reduces the observed behaviour to a basic mechanistic instinct related to feeding or reproduction or survival. That comment will also be the most upvoted one. The commentator does not present additional information, but for some reason his opinion is given more value than that of the experts who wrote the original study. That phenomenon is particularly prevalent on Reddit.

It could be a collective defense mechanism. The idea of animal intelligence being a threat to what many people perceive as the necessary status quo of being able to endlessly consume the resources of nature without consequence.

> The commentator does not present additional information

The commentator pointed out that the video is literally sped up which changes the entire meaning.

Have you considered this has nothing to do with hating animals and entirely to do with hating articles written to create drama and/or crisis where there is none?

The commenter has unsubstabtiated opinion, no expertiese and has brought no extra factual information to support his point the discussion. Its literwlly just soreading FUD

The fact that the video is sped up is not new information. It is immediately known when you watch it, it says that the video shows a week in the life of a whale yet the video lasts only 45s. You can only pretend in bad faith that it is not immediately obvious that whales and boats don't travel at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour across the ocean.

Whales can talk with other whales at several km. I'm unsure about what I'm seeing in the small scaled video, but there is not necessarily a physical collision here. A "Sonic wave collision" is much more probable.

Also the ocean is a 3D mass of water. A sperm whale crossing the path of a ship could be perfectly at 800m of distance while doing it. (Probably not this particular case, I assume that the antenna can only work at surface, but we should take a look to the article methodology before to conclude that the whale is moving to avoid to crash with the ship).

Alt source:

https://twitter.com/ballenaschile/status/1356703048270249985

I'm open to an explanation. But, I think a lot of the effect of the animation is created by the dots representing the whale and ships being huge. In reality the dots would be tiny and almost never come into visible range of each other.

And the massive trails on the ships! What purpose does that serve other than to mislead?

I thought it was wake indicator or intended as a tracer

On twitter they say it is an indicator of speed. If sound is the main culprit in deterring the whale from the natural pattern, then it makes sense for a faster moving ships to have a more dramatic visual weight. That is a whale should be just as stressed of hearing something loud come at it with a high speed as we would be at seeing something big come at us on high speed.

Shipping noise can travel much further underwater than through the air. If the effect being shown is real then I wouldn't be shocked if sound were the culprit.

Furthermore, vessel noise has been shown [1] to be significantly detrimental to several species of whale already.

[1] https://www.sanjuanjournal.com/news/how-vessel-noise-affects...

For scale, the latitude lines are drawn at 0.2 degree increments, i.e. 12 nautical miles or 22 km apart (1 degree of latitude - or 1 degree of longitude if and only if you're at the equator - is 60 nautical miles).

I don't think the animation type influences the information in a misleading way and I think that the suggested effect is real.

Whales use sound to gather information about their surroundings rather than sight. So it isn't about visibility range, but rather about auditory range. In addition, sound travels at a different speed under water (I don't know how it affects the range).

The movie 'The last Giants' [1] is a documentation about the whales in the Strait of Gibraltar. While I don't think it is a particular good movie (too emotional), I think the basic information presented, gives a good impression of how whales are affected by modern ships. It is cruel.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1470753/

In addition to the diesel engine noise most of these ships are running sonar systems which affect marine mammals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar#Effect_on_marine_mammals

The size and shape of the trails is misleading. If this is caused by sound waves, then they should use circles around each ship.

Thats not the point. I’m sure whales can hear the doppler shifts just as easily—or even easier—then we. And I’m sure they can deduce the direction and speed of a vessel just as well. And I’m sure being in the line of attack of something really big and really fast moving is just as stressful for a whale as it is for us.

I think to properly interpret this, you’d need to see a control case where the same whale is the same or similar area with zero ships. Do they normally just swim in that pattern? Perhaps that’s the normal manner in which they troll for krill.

Sadly I don't think we can get that control case without shutting down all shipping in a huge area.

Shipping traffic is surprisingly concentrated into high-traffic sea lanes. Ships (like aircraft) follow least-energy, shortest-distance paths between economical (high-traffic) ports.

The Southern Ocean in particular sees exceptionally little shipping traffic.

I don't need a control case to observe that the whale's movement pattern at least identifies the drawn wakes.

“That’s horrible!” Most people say while reading this on their way to the sushi restaurant. We’re ruining the world for all living things (and ourselves but we don’t seem to have fully grasped it yet). I have nothing to add except that it’s very sad. I could say “quit buying fish if you’re at all concerned about the situation” but I expect to be downvoted to oblivion for stating such a radical idea.

Plenty of us are vegan and think human influence on animal habitats is horrible. I can’t tell if you’re projecting your own unwillingness to make change onto others.

Non sequitur.

Most (if not all) of those are clearly maritime traffic connecting two points of the shore in an endless loop, not fishing ships.

It's sped up and edited, sure. But as (relatively) simple visualisations go, that was pretty emotional.

Maybe more emotional than it needs to be though. In real time the whale would have hours or even days to get out of the way.

Folks in this thread are real quick to dismiss any concern for the animal and it’s habitat and that’s pretty sad. Is it so hard to believe human activity is harming these animals?

It's very easy to believe and it has absolutely nothing to do with the speed and motion of ships and instead with the presence of sonar and engine and propeller noises.

What struck me about the data was how congested the area seems. We know about noise problems but I found the data very helpful in visualizing the size of the whales habitat compared to the quantity of boat traffic.

It's not an inability to believe it's true. It's more being burnt out by ritualized concern. It comes from seeing something awful that we're all supposed to be concerned about, listening to people beat their chest about it, and then the next day it's something else and those people have moved on to that and forgotten about yesterday's crisis.

If some people are responding to this study inappropriately that’s their problem. But when presented with this information I find it unhelpful for people to dismiss it and say things are fine. Things are not fine for the animals of this planet and I don’t think that should be dismissed, even if some types of people’s response to the information is annoying.

That's overtly cynical. The truth is, in many cases, we won't know what we should possibly be concerned about, unless we are offered the right information.

We all have our blind-spots, and we all have our partialities.

If 'ritualized concern' actually means, to you, that people aren't as concerned about your beliefs, as you think they should be, then that's quite different to a discussion about whether the whale in the visualisation, really feels the way I suspect it might.

Surely ships' wakes don't go on for that long? What would the image look like if the tracers of the ships were reduced to a quarter of their size, which would be much closer to reality?

On twitter they explain the tail represents speed, not wake.

https://twitter.com/NiklasAstrand/status/1358321916369592321

Each travelling ship leaves behind a tail that's much longer than what I would expect if it was meant to represent the wake. Does anyone know the significance of the tail?

Fuck me, Independent. I've not got all day.

Want to load some content in at any point or are we just gonna get a few more random videos and other guff loaded in first?

Why do we get sensationalist articles on HN? Surely the reason this is interesting is not the animation quality. I really hope certain sites would not even appear due to their poor reputation score focusing sensationalism. Here is a few to name:

quantamagazine.org, nautil.us masquerading as science journals

phys.org masquerading as physics journal

indepenedent.com, et al not masquerading as anything they are just crap

Didn’t watch, took too long to load. Let this be a lesson to web developers.

I couldn't even figure out where the animation was among all the ads.

Someone else[0] posted a twitter link to the animation.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125020

Could it be krill or whatever food source are hemmed in by the sound of ships and the whale is following food.

This might be more about krill than whales?

Maybe it's moving away from the ships after they realize they're competing too much for food

What region is this? What does it look like in real time? It’s a bit misleading to speed it up 1000x.

I'm not actually able to find the animation in the article. Not a good source.

It's litteraly the first piece of content.

But the last piece of content to load for me.

Use uBlock origin and it will load right after the text of the article.

There's just a black rectangle at the top of the page when opened with Firefox for Android or Firefox Klar (Focus for German-speaking countries, telemetry disabled by default) -- even with tracking protection off.

Edit: turning uBlock Origin off helped!

I run firefox on PC and have a uBlock origin with a lot of list enabled, plus privacy badger. I can see the video with uBlock origin.

For me, not even turning off ublock origin in Firefox worked. The animation was only visible in Chrome (with ublock origin activated).

It wasn't loading for me. Disabling uBlock Origin didn't help either.

Amp built in without the normal way to remove it from the url and get a normal page!? No thank you, not worth viewing then. When did the independent start doing that?

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