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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

What's alarming is that younger orcas are learning how to do it:

> Two days earlier, a pod of six orcas assailed another sailboat navigating the strait. Greg Blackburn, who was aboard the vessel, looked on as a mother orca appeared to teach her calf how to charge into the rudder. "It was definitely some form of education, teaching going on,"

https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/orcas-have-sunk-3-...

> Experts suspect that a female orca they call White Gladis suffered a "critical moment of agony" — a collision with a boat or entrapment during illegal fishing — that flipped a behavioral switch. "That traumatized orca is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat,"

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Alarming? There's 7,000,000,000 humans and only 50,000 orcas left. Who's in the wrong here?

The orcas. Humans are the apex predator, the orcas better clean their act before we lose our patience.

What's with the anti-human attitude? Sounds like a lot of the commenters here would rather kill 1000 humans (but of course not you or your family or your friends, maybe just some Spanish fishermen?) than the same number of orcas.

you've got it backwards: Earth is not a zero-sum game.

"we'd be better off with fewer than 8G people" is not advocating murder, either.

What’s with the human centric attitude? Do we own this planet or are we one mammal species on it currently driving the other species towards mass extinction?

If the trolley problem you're presenting is 1000 orcas or 1000 humans, I'd say it's a no-brainer that the orcas should be preserved.

8 billion humans as of last November.

It's alarming for the whales, I'm afraid humans will kill them out of spite if the attacks increase.

What’s happening is that there’s a small sailing craft prohibition on a part of the Galician coast

Alarming for Orcas.

Species that go out of their way to get in our way usually died off before modern times.

Have we tried positive intervention? I know it's against marine biologists' code of ethics. But if they're intelligent enough to mount this response, they might be intelligent enough to...erm...reason with? Recondition?

We do not negotiate with terrorists!

We could bribe them with locations that contain more fish and fewer people.

Maybe they don't appreciate the over-fishing and attacking these boats is all they can realistically do. Would anything even change if they were to write a formal letter to the "apex predator"?

> if they're intelligent enough to mount this response

The idea that this is some sort of planned, coordinated response to overfishing has not been even remotely proven, and is not backed by any researchers. It's just the fanciful thinking of some imaginative HNers. The idea is patently absurd. The boats they're attacking are not even fishing boats.

What's your threshold to acknowledge this as intentional, intelligent behavior

How about when an actual marine biologist starts thinking so, instead of a computer programmer?

> idea that this is some sort of planned, coordinated response to overfishing

Never implied as much. Animal is pissed off at a pattern. Showing them that pattern isn’t dangerous by e.g. being nice to them from boats was the idea.

What pattern is that?

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