Orcas are breaking rudders off boats in Europe
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
> "They'd kill fish and just swim around with this fish on their head," Towers tells NPR. "We just don't see that anymore.”
Imagining the behavioral / fashion trends of Orcas over time is really fascinating :D
I attribute the trouble with today’s youth to an overall decline in the importance of traditional pod values in Orca society.
"Breaking rudders, really? That's so '80s ... Can't believe that's coming back."
https://old.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/comments/wwuqhh/orca_...
Edit: NSFL
Tik Tok for orcas would not be a positive, but I get the feeling they are doing a "look what I did" all the same.
That being said, I'm convinced we continue to deeply underestimate the intelligence and competence of numerous species, even today when we like to talk about how ridiculously smart dolphins and whales and dogs and birds and primates etc... are.
I remember thinking, "I will be that dad who does not underestimate my kids capabilities. I won't hold them back." And my 5yo is still absolutely blowing me away with his ability to build complex redstone machines in Minecraft. I think humans are just really good at underestimating competence.
Eventually, it was shot and killed by a random hunter in Canada who had no idea who that bear was. The bear didn't know Canadians could also be dangerous, otherwise it probably wouldn't have let anyone see it there either...
I think a lot of animals are probably very good at what they've evolved to do. Bears are great at tracking and surviving being tracked (probably more typically by bigger bears); reading about it felt like getting a glimpse into another animal's domain and being totally outmatched.
The humans really don't like that and Lem's story struggles to really sell it because of course Lem was human, so it's hard to play the role of "Machine which is just categorically more intelligent than my whole species" effectively.
One of the clever tricks in Vinge's "Tatja Grimm's World" is that Tatja is way more intelligent than everybody else on her planet, yet because of why she's more intelligent than everybody else Vinge doesn't need to somehow imagine being far smarter than he is.
Interestingly, I believe the engine + grandmaster combination can still defeat the best engines.
When I was getting into weightlifting, which I had always dismissed as a pursuit for dumb bro types, I was similarly impressed with the knowledge out there about nutrition, anatomy, the way that muscles tear and repair and grow, etc.
I think it's an all too common "nerd social fallacy" to assume that people who don't have that "traditional" scientific/math intelligence aren't smart, but as I've gotten older it seems to me that, on average, most humans are pretty damn smart about one thing or another.
Dunning-Kruger effect. It's all too common on places like HN.
I talk to people like that at work often.
Do you think they might actually be bears?
In relation to your above comment I felt they did a good job throughout the series showing the difficulties in communicating amongst lowly people and entities and creatures that are higher up in the pecking order.
didn't work for that walrus Freya. You just need a few not even very bad just not very good humans, especially if they happen to be government bureaucrats. Hope there is more protection for orcas.
After we’ve hunted them into endangered status.
Guessing the rudder attacks are either teenage pranks or misunderstanding that boats belong to humans.
For instance, in Moby-Dick (1851) Herman Melville dedicates an entire chapter to explaining the taxonomy of cetaceans and says they aren't fish because they breath air, have lungs, have horizontal tails, etc. But then he says whalers scoff at this distinction and consider them fish because they live in the water.
300 years ago the society had names for these species. Especially local fishermen would know.
Minor correction: Not in the wild.
In captivity, there have been some: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orca_attack
I'll side with the orca on that one.
slow clap
When a high-status orca eats a really special tuna, then another lower-status orca can pay to virtually "own" the memory of the eaten tuna.
The native peoples in the Northwest say the orcas change into people and walk among the villagers. They also say that humans that drown at sea become killer whales and when they interact with boats like this story or swim really close to shore they’re trying to communicate with their human families
I’ve always loved that mythos.
There are many possible explanations for it, selective eaters, not tasty, knowing what they are getting themselves into.
At the same time they are curious, playful, and it seems emotional, if they have trends like breaking boats & carrying dead fish. It's a miracle such playfulness never ever accidentally killed a human.
After Sperm whales they have the largest brains in the world. Of course big sections of that is dedicated to their complicated bodily functions. But I think we are most likely severely underestimating their intelligence.
Edit: "a recorded human death in the wild"
Seems fitting.
My ex was friends with one of them. They were biology students together at the University of Victoria.
At first blush this struck me as a silly comment, so I read the article... and boy, are you right. It really does sound like an intentional, even methodical killing. Here's the description from the wiki:
> As part of the end-of-show routine, [Dawn Brancheau] was at the edge of the pool, rubbing Tilikum's head. She was lying with her face next to Tilikum's on a slide-out, which is a platform submerged about a foot into the water. SeaWorld claims that she was pulled into the water by her ponytail. Some witnesses reported seeing Tilikum grab Brancheau by the arm or shoulder. The orca's move seems to have been very quick, pulling her underwater and drowning her. At least a dozen patrons witnessed Brancheau in the water with Tilikum. Employees used nets and threw food at Tilikum in an attempt to distract him. Moving from pool to pool in the complex, they eventually directed Tilikum to a smaller, medical pool, where it would be easier to calm him. After approximately 45 minutes, Tilikum released Brancheau's body.
I suppose I'm anthropomorphizing and making a lot of assumptions, but holding that poor woman under water for 45 minutes strikes me as making sure that she's dead--particularly since its caretakers (who, presumably, have a strong understanding of how to influence its behavior) were actively attempting to entice it to let her go. For 45 minutes.
Really wild stuff.
Tilikum became an infamous whale after attacking and killing his trainer, forty-year-old SeaWorld staff member Dawn Brancheau. Tilikum grabbed her arm, scalped the woman, fractured her jaw and killed her by blunt force trauma, the result of which was a contentious and controversial legal case over the safety of working with orca whales and the ethics of keeping live whales and other marine mammals in captivity.
The other is that these are massive animals placed in water prisons, constantly exposed to the sun and concrete and fed fish they wouldn't eat in the wild. It would be like putting a human in a small 3'x3' box with the top exposed to the sun and fed dog food and then being surprised that they're on edge.
That orca definitely killed the trainer on purpose or did it in a way such that it didn't care whether she lived or died and was releasing frustration. An orca could bite a human in half in the same way that a human can bite through jello, which shows that the orca was displaying frustration and exasperation. Orcas have committed suicide while in captivity, by intentionally and repeatedly ramming their heads into the concrete walls to cause brain hemorrhages or starving themselves.
To be frank, it is mindblowing to me that people view these incidences as examples of orca intelligence rather than exhibitions of human cruelty and unintelligence.
edit: and one reaaaaly primitive, you know, mammals only worth when on the sapiens sapiens ballpark
I'll agree it is confrontational, but I addressed it to people in general, so it's meant to be confrontational to the collective. And it's justifiably so because these beings continue to be held in captivity, bred in captivity, and even captured from the wild to be held in captivity. It's pure torture that people charge for visitors to come and laugh and gawk at.
I get that you're trying to make a point, but this kind of hyperbole only discredits it.
> Orcas have committed suicide while in captivity, by intentionally and repeatedly ramming their heads into the concrete walls to cause brain hemorrhages
I think you mean AN orca did this (Hugo), and it was after being kept in solitary isolation for 12 years, something that SeaWorld thankfully doesn't do.
How is it hyperbole, exactly?
https://www.thedodo.com/seaworld-tank-size-1282993451.html
https://www.thedodo.com/lolita-orca-45-years-1301583008.html
Wild orcas travel on average 40 miles a day, can travel 100 miles in a single day, and make round trips in the thousands of miles. They dive several hundred feet every day. It isn't hyperbole unless you're going to bikeshed over the exact footage. The chemicals in the pool and drugs they are given are also another thing.
> I think you mean AN orca did this
Hugo was with a tank mate Lolita at the time but had been in isolation prior to that.
Here's a recent case that was recorded: https://nymag.com/article/2016/06/did-a-depressed-seaworld-o...
Let's not act like the orca entertainment industry is forthcoming with data.
https://inherentlywild.co.uk/deceased-orcas/
There are cases of captive orcas arguably attempting suicide, either by intentional ramming, stranding, or starvation. It is indeed hard to find good data on this (I wonder why...), and so it is hard to state absolutes.
This ignores the much more common and documented violent outbursts towards both trainers and fellow tankmates/cellmates induced by the stress they experience in captivity.
Mixing up Miami Seaquarium in a discussion about SeaWorld is confused. The two environments are totally incomparable.
If you believe Blackfish, dolphins (which orcas are a type of) can just stop breathing if they want to commit suicide, so the ramming of the heads is moot. Humans occasionally ram their heads without intent to kill, so why would orcas be different?
For example, the average American walks 1.5-2 miles a day, so that's a factor of over x20 for the average travel distance of orcas (which by the way is average linear distance, i.e., starting point to ending point, and not total travel which is much higher). Humans don't dive and live very horizontal lives, while orcas dive 100-500 feet multiple times every day. Their tanks at SeaWorld are only approximately 30 feet deep, lesser at other places.
So your "factor of about 370" doesn't make any sense, because it myopically only takes into account relative size and a false comparison of human height versus orca length.
And by the way, I said a box with the lid off, so your mention of a 3'x3'x3' is incorrect. It's hard to believe how my off-the-cuff suggestion of 3'x3' versus your "calculated" 13'x13' discredits my point in any way. And I left something off, because the orcas experience strong chemicals in the water, so the human box would need a gas of some sort constantly irritating the skin and eyes.
So yes, it is bikeshedding, because here we are.
> Mixing up Miami Seaquarium in a discussion about SeaWorld is confused. The two environments are totally incomparable.
I'm not confused about anything or mixing anything up. I genuinely have no idea what you're referring to or even getting at. Also, you do know that SeaWorld loans and sells orcas to places that often have far worse conditions than SeaWorld's already deplorable conditions, right?
I don't know what you're getting at in your last comment at all. Orcas weigh several tons. And an orca intentionally stranding isn't trying to commit suicide by suffocation. I didn't even say so. Orcas die from stranding due to their immense weight affecting their internal organs.
I have no idea how one can do any research into the lives orcas live in captivity and feel anything remotely close to okay with it.
> like putting a human in a small 3'x3' box
Good thing you provided a number then? If you want to make a qualitative example, say "it would be like if a human lived in a heated swimming pool for the rest of its life" which is more accurate. Instead, you (and I think it's obvious you know what you're doing) throw out a number, then when you're demonstrated wrong, backpedal and say it was supposed to be qualitative.
> the orcas experience strong chemicals in the water
Do you think there aren't strong chemicals in the ocean? Salt is pretty corrosive. The ocean isn't exactly a homogeneous solution. There are a ton of pathogens as well, in fact most of them on earth live in the ocean.
> you do know that SeaWorld loans and sells orcas to places that often have far worse conditions than SeaWorld's
Yes, and that's a ringing endorsement for SeaWorld in my book. It means they are a leader in the care of these mammals. They actually have to participate in loan programs in order to be AZA accredited, which they are.
> I have no idea how one can do any research into the lives orcas live in captivity and feel anything remotely close to okay with it.
This is common among people who just haven't done much research on it. Marine mammal captivity is an important activity humans do in order to promote education, not to mention conservation (for species reintroduction or rehab in case of a catastrophe). It's a little unintuitive the same way that hunting (killing animals) supports wildlife preserves is unintuitive, but nevertheless there are good reasons we have these institutions and getting rid of them would be a huge mistake.
More importantly, the orcas taken didn't need conservation they were fine before
2. That’s a statement that would hold true for any species and for conservation as a whole. In essence, denying the need for conservation in the first place. Ignorant of the daily catastrophe that’s happening in the wild.
Taking a calf from the wild that would otherwise be fine for 60 years is not conservation.
At this point I'm not sure if you're stupid or just evil.
I don’t know how you expect injured and rejected juveniles to survive outside of an artificial environment. Orcas are social animals, and they need a pod.
As far as stupid/evil, well believe what you like but I just believe in resilience. The same way we should have an arctic seed vault backing up seeds we should have a backup for different kinds of sea life.
...are you going to expand on why you think it's hyperbole?
Seaworld Orlando’s enclosure is approx 6 million gallons, so that statement is off by about 37,500%.
The poor orca who's been abducted at 2 and kept in a swimming pool for decades for fun and profit you mean ?
check out the article
You also make the dumb assumption that all creatures are here to perform a task, that isn't how real life species work
I never said anyone is here to perform a task. That said, I am happier pressing buttons on a machine than I am just lying motionless. It doesn’t matter that the activity is artificial, doing something is by far preferable to doing nothing.
Also if you're happy pushing buttons, you're probably unhappy.
If you think orcas are doing nothing at sea, how is that morally different from them doing nothing in a tank?
Freedom to roam, even if spending much of their time doing nothing it's still freedom.
That’s why we diversified and created towns and cities, artificial, restricted environments that allow life but are not as fun (or possible) to run around, but agriculture makes life a little more guaranteed and predictable. The same is true for orcas. The ocean is great, but it’s also dangerous and volatile. If we create a “town” for orcas it provides support for life at the exchange of freedom. This is hardly different from what we humans put ourselves through.
There are a few ways I could see this happening. Perhaps they found a lone sailor, or maybe a small boat of migrants coming from Morocco made an easy target.
Sharks on the other hand, swim in waters people tend to frequent.
It's a numbers game.
"A large number of (shark) bites occur when water conditions are poor"
- https://saveourseas.com/worldofsharks/why-do-sharks-bite-peopleEdit: granted, I didn't mention that it's typically great white, tiger and bulls that are life threatening among sharks. So it isn't really a billion versus 50k. Regardless, there aren't really that many fatalities by sharks per year.
Next to that Orcas frequently interact with humans, more than sharks. For instance as this article describes, they are quite active in the tiny mediterranean sea. Which some human even swim across (60 attempts per year).
Also they live close to the surface, they need to breath every 5-15 minutes. And just as sharks they enjoy Sea Lions, which sharks often confuse with humans.
Also they don't often confuse Sea Lions for humans, but it's still a good explanation for the few attacks that do occur. It's actually impressive how good they are at recognizing their prey.
Sharks are a group of taxonomical orders. Orcas are a species.
You wouldn't want to swim with them anyway, for the same reason you wouldn't want to run with a herd of stampeding cows.
But it doesn't matter at all; the difference between the taxonomic level of "sharks" and the taxonomic level of "orcas" is unimaginably large regardless of what you want to call the levels.
Orcas are savage, incredibly strong, smart, and capable pack hunters. Absolute apex predator of the sea and sharks don't stand a chance.
To be clear, shark livers are so big because they have an extra job ours don't.
The description of the video is worth reading for context.
I've noticed a real hesitancy to ascribe such complex reasoning to cetaceans. But these are thoughtful animals that in one instance led the creation of a complex and astonishingly cooperative co-hunting relationship with human whalers. They clearly understand humans are able to kill baleen whales even orcas can't handle (adult humpbacks, for example). It seems obvious that they also understand the potential consequences of competing with / preying upon a highly social alpha predator.
They kill blue whales, sperm whales, and great white sharks. The notion that orcas are anything other than apex predators is just silly.
It wasn't until recently that humans would be numerous enough in the water to be a viable food source for an Orca.
Tweak some things about our evolution and Orcas would kill humans often, sometimes for fun.
Orcas are the Hannibal Lectors of the Sea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...
Given this, I think it is conceivable that these orcas may have achieved some sort of understanding of fishing boats as competing with them for their food, and developed a hostility towards boats as a result.
IIRC, not all orca pods hunt whales or other marine mammals, and many are generally fish eaters. I would not be at all comfortable in a life raft or similar boat in the presence of orcas that do hunt seals or emperor penguins.
In 1989 American researcher Bernd Würsig published an article about him having been attacked by a killer whale on a beach of Valdes Peninsula. A single individual, possibly as big as 9 metres (30 ft), beached towards him while he was watching sea lions about 200 metres (650 ft) from him in hope to take a photograph of a killer whale hunt. Dr Würsig ran up the beach after the animal missed him by about 1 metre. He speculated that the whale might have mistaken him for a pinniped.[19]
So he wasn't actually attacked?
I tried finding it, but could not, but it's in German and the title says he was attacked (for who knows what definition).
Put a person around an Orca for long enough, and eventually, the odds are reasonable that the Orca will kill them.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/science/sharks-killer-wha...
The reason for difference of attacks is biology and intelligence. Sharks are basically one big system of sensors, and they attack basically anything that triggers those sensors. Orcas have a much, much higher intelligence (on the level of humans, in my opinion), and so they probably see humans the same way we see sloths. That is, we're curious about them, but they would make for a nasty and rather pointless meal.
Orcas also have generational memory, so for certain pods, humans are probably known to them and they'd rather not directly engage.
Orcas are highly intelligent, and it's my opinion that they know exactly what they're doing and are frustrated with the competition.
I think the running assumption should be that orcas are as intelligent as humans. Their brains are much larger and have more complex/dense folds than ours. They're also more socially bound than us, likely giving them a higher emotional intelligence.
That was also true of Homo Sapiens for quite a while. We have the same brains for thousands of years, which is adaptable enough for both hunger-gathering, as well as rocket science.
Orcas don't have hands and live underwater. That may put a damper on their industry.
The modern day human brain is essentially identical to the earliest hunter-gatherer humans. Those groups did not have writing systems, industry, agriculture, etc., and yet their intelligence remains equal to ours. It is my suspicion, based upon my reading of orca behavior and biology, that such is the case with orcas. Even modern-day hunter-gatherer societies do not have writing systems or agriculture.
On a related note, I would even argue that our modern technology exposes the limits of human intelligence, particularly that of social and emotional intelligence.
Orcas appear to have quite high social and emotional intelligence in addition to their more raw intelligence of problem solving, teaching, and language.
The biology is rather clear. Their brains are very complex, even more so than ours when it comes to folds. The areas of their brains relating to social and emotional processes are bigger, relatively speaking, than the corresponding areas in human brains.
It is tempting to rate their intelligence lower because they don’t have tractors or rockets, but I think this is mistaken. Nearly every piece of research shows that they’re more intelligent and complex than we previously thought.
Ants have agriculture and industry. Ants are the only other species (besides humans) that are capable of civilization.
Perhaps intelligence is not as important a factor as we think. :)
(Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish)
They probably haven't accounted for human denial and human-centric science. These two things lead to scientists being like "Gee! I wonder why they're parading their dead babies and carrying them around? They must be grieving!"
As opposed to a slightly more realistic interpretation:
"They must be grieving and are trying to tell us 'See what you're doing to us?'"
I’m imagining a boolean column somewhere dedicated to tracking whether every patient has been attacked by an orca or not. It’s fun to imagine things sometimes
> ...
> Conservationists urge the public not to view these incidents as malicious. "They are not attacks, they are interactions, that is, killer whales detect a foreign object that enters their lives and respond to its presence, but not in an aggressive way,” Alfredo López of Iberian Orca, a conservation group, tells Newsweek’s Robyn White.
Not that I necessarily blame the orcas here, but this framing is so bizarre and out of touch.
"Yes, they destroyed the boat and the people had to be rescued, but it's not aggressive."
When organizations use weasel words and spaghetti logic like this, they signal that they're not interested in arguing in good faith, and people start dismissing them out of hand.
> When organizations use weasel words and spaghetti logic like this, they signal that they're not interested in arguing in good faith
There are a few relevant questions in a scenario like this:
1. Was the attack intentional?
2. Was causing harm/destruction a goal of the attack?
3. Orcas are predators. Were they attempting to eat anyone?
I would interpret "not in an aggressive way" as drawing a line between questions (1) and (2), and that's certainly an important distinction to draw. It's also possible to draw a line between (2) and (3), which wouldn't match well with the ordinary use of the word "aggressive", but which is still important and is suggested by the context.
Sure, they weren't trying to eat anyone, and I don't believe orcas basically ever actually try to kill humans...but the very fact that they don't further underlines how smart they are, so yeah they knew what they were doing.
The concepts an animal understands are not particularly related to the animal's intelligence. Human property is a major part of the world of dogs, and not at all a part of the world of orcas.
> I believe they've been shown to cooperate with humans in hunting before
Case in point. Orcas in the wild are pack hunters. This is an easy adjustment for them to make.
Alternatively, they're doing this for a specific reason. Perhaps noise pollution, food scarcity, just general annoyance with the boats, etc.
Increasing water temp, climate change, food scarcity, environmental pollution, desperation, habitat loss, new audible or physical disturbances caused by these boats. I mean, there's probably 100 different reasons you could think of for why now.
"Fads" answer nothing aside from simply removing the need for further explanation. Why are they doing that? I don't know, they're bored! It's a fad. Great research.
> "They'd kill fish and just swim around with this fish on their head," Towers tells NPR. "We just don't see that anymore.”
If I didn't know any better, it sounds like the Orcas discovered TikTok long before we did.
Edit:
It's a joke y'all. I find the trends in TikTok both hilarious and scary. Maybe Orca parents do too /s
He says it is known that the problem is caused by an adult female, who has some “teenagers” who either take part or hang around observing.
His proposed solution is a 50 cal riffle to the brain of the adult female. IDK
Sorry to hear about the boat, but shooting at them is not the right answer.
An attack on someone's rudder while offshore is 100% an attack on their life, and arguably justifies lethal self defense.
Soon enough everything will reach equilibrium again, I doubt shooting orcas will put us on a better path
One of the most fascinating episodes of mythbusters I've ever seen was watching what happens to bullets (even up to .50 cal IIRC) when they hit water. They disintegrate within like 1m.
Disclaimer: I vehemently disagree with the idea of shooting the killer whales.
Or in other words, I wouldn’t assume that bullets impacting water at lower velocities would behave the same.
Fwiw, I don’t remember them using a 50 cal. The amount of energy in a 50BMG compared to even a 30 cal round is ridiculously huge, and IMO would have risked damaging the pool.
I wonder if someone already tried this. Some fishermen view marine life as competition.
A couple years ago near Seattle there were I think seals washing up with bullet wounds.
Are the orcas responding to being attacked?
Monkeys groom one another to remove lice.
Humans are the lice.
To the downvote: I'm sure you've heard a drone buzzing above your head and getting nervous. A boat propeller does the same thing.
Granted, this was a lonely little fellow. But, he knew perfectly well what he was doing and repeatedly approached boats, despite the noise. He died after colliding with a tugboat prop.
https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2022-07-31/5-rescued-af...
Discussion amongst "cruisers", common terminology for people who live on boats:
https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f2/orcas-sink-yacht-off...
So orcas are trying to get the attention from humans, because they know that humans have tuna. And they do strange things because they also know that humans trow dead fishes discarded in nets to the sea.
For example maybe the makers of paints or sealants used on wooden rudders changed formulations due to pandemic supply chain issues or for environmental or regulatory reasons, and now they include something that smells like food to the Orcas.
Outhouse tipping for adolescent Orcas?
(OK, so maybe you have to have grown up in a rural area, 50 years ago to know that tipping over the small outdoor toilets called outhouses was a favorite low key vandalism for bored adolescent males, but ...)
Orcas has no food so they knock out fishing boats.
Evolution?
Tragedy of the commons: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
I figured it along the lines of diminished habitat leading to attacks on a perceived invader, which just so happens to be far worse than any natural predator. It might also take additional experimentation/observation to see if some orcas are predisposed to aggressive behavior when perpetually hungry, but this seems to me quite a natural impulse to starvation. In any case, it will lead to evolutionary adaptation … or extinction.
0. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7e/f7/c3/7ef7c3244b3e4fd1f224...
1. https://www.stateofthebay.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/prey...
3. https://usa.oceana.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/593/sardin...
even a quick glance at data shows massive reductions in fish stocks, see other post.
or basically any research study
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1467-2979....
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266684781_A_century...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027277141...
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/09/hawaiian-reefs-lost-almost...