Orcas are learning terrifying new behaviors. Are they getting smarter? | Hacker News Reader

Orcas are learning terrifying new behaviors. Are they getting smarter?

livescience.com

43 pointsamichail68 comments

> It's not likely that orcas' brains are changing on an anatomical level, said Josh McInnes, a marine ecologist who studies orcas at the University of British Columbia. "Behavioral change can influence anatomical change in an animal or a population" — but only over thousands of years of evolution, McInnes told Live Science.

> But orcas are fast learners, which means they can and do teach each other some terrifying tricks, and thus become "smarter" as a group.

It feels weird to use quotations on "smarter" or pretend this is a complicated concept when it's just describing how humans achieved greater intelligence faster than the speed of evolution.

I read that as acknowledging that it was personifying (or animalifying rather) the group, a group doesn't really have an intelligence level to go up or down, to get smarter, but we know what we mean by that so it's a useful shorthand, but hence the scare-quotes.

Not saying I'm necessarily right, just that was my interpretation before I saw your comment.

Imagine if someone used those scare-quotes when talking about a group of humans.

I don't know if they intended them as a form of personification, but it's surely unnecessary either way.

> It feels weird to use quotations on "smarter" or pretend this is a complicated concept when it's just describing how humans achieved greater intelligence faster than the speed of evolution.

It’s in quotes because the orca did not become smarter.

If you replace orca with human, the quotes would still make sense.

Previously people whose boats were attacked by orca were likely to have reacted forcefully. Killing might not be required even, just enough force to communicate "these creatures bite back."

Human societies tend to lose those lessons after 3 or 4 generations, too. Then someone has to learn again the hard way.

I agree... in the past they would have gotten harpooned and quickly communicated to others that going near human boats was a bad idea.

I think coming up with some non-lethal way of deterring them might be a good idea. A killer whale taser of some sort. Just sitting there watching it tear your boat to shreds seems like a bad idea.

seems to me we otter be able to come up with an underwater siren or some such that they find intolerable but not actually injurious

Yeah that might work as well. A taser isn't going to injure them, but yes it would be painful initially.

Can you (effectively, safely) Tase things which are swimming in salty ocean water?

Not sure with something that big but biologists electrocute smaller fish in rivers/lakes all the time so they can tag them. Mammals are different, but you're not trying to knock it out, only dissuade it from coming closer.

> Human societies tend to lose those lessons after 3 or 4 generations, too. Then someone has to learn again the hard way.

Human societies usually lose all lessons after exactly 1 generation.

Hence the wolves debate.

As we can see all across Europe, as apparently the younger generations have no idea what many of the goverments looked like until the late 70's.

Nor how fascism took root.

This brings up for me an interesting question. Does the rise of intelligence in one creature put an evolutionary pressure towards it in other species, and how rapidly can that manifest. We’ve certainly bred dogs for intelligence, border collies are genuinely amazing creatures and that developed in a somewhat human time scale.

It would certainly exert an "adapt or die" pressure on that species' prey and their competition in the food chain. Although, nature seldom selects for intelligence.

We are demonstrating now that, in addition to these issues, a great many species are incurring collateral damage, up to and including extinction, from the indirect environmental consequences of our evolutionary fitness.

While, in general, it seems that nature seldom selects for intelligence, over the last ~5 million years there was an evolutionary radiation of hominins, now collapsed down to just our own species. While the causes of this history are not clear, it seems plausible that cognitive developments played a role.

> But this is probably not a new behavior — just a case of humans finally seeing it up close.

> "Because there are more cameras and more boats, we're starting to see these behaviors that we hadn't seen before,"

We now all have video/camera evidence of why ancient sailors called Orcas "killer whales."

They're called killer whales because they kill other whales.

All the behaviors described in the article don’t seem that new to me. I was expecting the (decade old?) clip of a pod working together to wash a stranded seal off a chunk of ice to be mentioned but it wasn’t

The article mentions that they typically prey on Weddell seals in this manner, but have now adapted this form of attack to go after Leopard and Crab seals, which make less use of floes and are "more feisty". It does not say how these attacks have been adapted.

The whole point of intelligence is the ability to learn. This might just be a case of an animal that already evolved to have intelligence learning and adapting. Orcas are social animals that communicate and and interact. So, they might show collective behavior and the ability to adapt as a group. And obviously we've been hunting them to extinction and generally harassing them in their own natural habitat; even imprisoning them. They'd be well excused to hold a few grudges.

The good news is that they could adapt again if we respect them.

There is a really good book that starts with the same plot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(Sch%C3%A4tzing_nove...

Could the spreeding of violent behaviors be a consequence of the increase in mercury pollution?

In which case we would just have ourselves to blame... and a moral duty to medically help them...

They are literally playing catch with baby porpoises & I think it's just because it's the closest they can find to a ball.

I wonder if we could produce some toys for Orcas and then offer these to them to induce bonding, then try communicating.

Like a giant rubber Kong filled with tongue and liver?

"Dere Humanz; thank u for ball. Send mor toys or we sink u boat eet tunge and liver. Understand?

XOXO, whales"

That's a good start - I've seen negotiations that started off worse.

Reminds me of early discussions in corporate acquisition.

An Orca likely sees a boat the way you look at the wrapper around a tasty snack.

Fortunately, they have not yet developed a taste for humans.

Neither liver nor tongue. As far as we know.

Smarter but less empathic.

The first image is quite disturbing. I wasn't ready for that. Maybe we need tags for those kinds of images.

Not relevant... contact the admins

I'm going to be honest, here we are techies which are supposed to be intellectual to an extent. We should be able to handle more violent truths natively: e.g. seeing images like that.

Through understanding, we can dismiss a chunk of the fear/repulsion we might feel for images such as those.

We're not all robots.

Images have emotional impact.

there is no "we" on a website like this and most readers here are certainly not intellectual. maybe intellectual to an extent ... but everybody is intellectual to an extent.

> here we are techies which are supposed to be intellectual to an extent. We should be able to handle more violent truths natively

I think many view stoicism in the face of such imagery to be a sign of an enlightened mind, but I disagree. Empathy is a form of intelligence. The images from the article are disturbing, and I'd argue they should be. That so many of us are quick to discount the obvious pain and suffering within is concerning to me, and I'd even label it a deficiency. We should feel upset by death and dismemberment.

Nature is brutal and deadly. If the orcas don't eat they will starve.

It is not a case of lacking empathy, it is more a case of recognizing that those images, as gory is they might be, are simply depictions of raw nature functioning as it should. Predator eats prey, and both play a role in this cycle. I personally find it fascinating, especially as humans evolved past the need to adapt to nature, and rather manipulate nature to better suit themselves.

It may be me living in a (wrong) bubble, but I have the impression that everything must be more gruesome nowadays. Take Hollywood movies where every shot must splatter blood on the walls behind, successful comics are all gory, even in books you'd see all this described in every detail. So these journalists are simply following a trend.

I wish sites had standardized on NSFL in addition to marking things NSFW. (Speaking generally, not specifically about HN here)

Or work like the conventional commits standard, and use "CW(nudity)" and "CW(gore)" where CW = Content Warning.

But then you'd have people pedantically arguing over exactly what words to use. Maybe tags instead? "CW(nature,gore,sea,flesh)".

Of course then you'd be relying on people's good graces to classify the links correctly. I have some hope that at least a sizable minority would use the content warnings correctly, mostly because of Lemmy and Mastodon. On the fediverse, people often make an effort to describe the images they post in descriptive text, so maybe they'd classify links well enough?

HN is one of the last places that needs trigger warnings and content warnings.

I was speaking more generally, not specifically about HN.

And how exactly does a trigger warning hurt you in any way shape or form? If an utterly harmless trigger warning triggers you so easily, well guess what…

Because it will get abused and used as a tool for content suppression by the bad actors on here. Just like flagging is used for a similar purpose occasionally on here.

Do you get flagged often by the bad actors? Because after a decade being on here the only things that get flagged are the worst of the worst. The two mods are pretty good about it. This makes me wonder why you’re so worried.

Rarely flagged, but when it happens it’s often by someone overly upset about some comment that was not a completely mainstream opinion (but not extreme either) that I made on some innocuous topic that they feel the need to be the zealous self-appointed content police.

However, I see it nearly daily because I consume HN using a feed reader and don’t rely on the HN homepage at all. So in my list of HN stories I see nothing flagged in my reader and will often pull up a post that should be totally appropriate for HN and hardly controversial at all just to see it now flagged and every so often interesting commentary completely shut down.

But I am not worried, because if this site gets to the point where we see these self-appointed censors make this place an uninteresting I’ll just move on.

Excellent point. I'll take trigger warnings as long as there is a "Trigger Warning: Trigger warnings" warning. Thanks for suggesting it.

Perfect!

This has some good discussions as to why people like (or don't like) trigger warnings. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21677026209213...

Overall, studies across a range of trigger warning types/groups have not found there's a significantly beneficial effect (and have found some minor negative effects).

Interesting. What it didn’t cover is people who rage against them.

It also didn’t cover types of trigger warnings, referred to people who consider trauma part of their “core identity”, and use self reporting of ptsd. I find any online survey that uses self reporting to define the population to be lesser quality. Like when pre-Kinsey researchers did the self reported penis size study.

> What it didn’t cover is people who rage against them.

For "Cross-cultural communication tensions", I think this essay is excellent: https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/

We would need things like CW(rust, JavaScript) etc

Why a system that beats around the bush? Just say "(Female Breasts)" or "(Blood and Guts)"

It is very sad that people are downvoting you for finding something disturbing.

Since the spring/summer, I feel like I've noticed a lot more downvotes being handed out. I really wish I had access to anonymized HN voting data so I could see whether it's a small group of accounts doing it, or if there's other patterns of behaviour.

Oh, and people are allowed to find things disturbing!! Whatever the experience of the generic HN user might be, there's a myriad of reasons that someone is upset by horrific images. It's like mocking someone for not watching cartel torture videos or something!

Let people enjoy things, and let people dislike things without bullying.

> Oh, and people are allowed to find things disturbing!!

Doesn't this also apply to those who are downvoting the parent?

They may find the parent's comment itself to be disturbing.

Maybe a small fraction of the readerbase are random downvoters, another misanthropes, another just don't like tangential remarks about images period, etc...

With all sympathy; I must advise you that the world is full of disturbing images and even experiences. You are very likely to experience more of them. Perhaps you would be happier in the long term if you found some accommodation and acceptance.

Not that you have to participate, but realize that trying to avoid bad things can only result in avoiding much of the world. Even tho the bad things are present, there's many good things there too.

I went to the article to check the image and it looks like a orca attacking something. What was disturbing in this image?

I am genuinely asking because with the amount of brutality we see everyday that picture did not look bad to me.

The first thing that came to mind, apart from what the article mentions with regard to our increased capacity for observation, was the increase in ocean temperatures and decrease in pH in some places. This could gradually induce psychosis in an intelligent species. Their water is slowly becoming battery acid and the food is becoming more scarce. Any being of sufficient cognitive ability would take these environmental pressures to cruel extents.

Wow is there anything climate change can’t explain?

No, but it certainly is a testament to pervasive greed and willful ignorance. Know what I mean?

It's called ocean "acidification" for some reason, but in fact the ocean is alkaline and is becoming closer to neutral pH. (down from 8.15 to 8.05, neutral is 7)

It's far from "slowly becoming battery acid".

Yes, I know what ocean acidification is.

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/ocean-acidification-what-you-ne...

Note, the first link mentions a 30 percent increase in the average acidity of seawater.

So if the ocean is around a pH of 8.1 and is heading south due to absorbing carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, doesn't it stand to reason that more pollution -> more co^2 -> lower pH over time? Eventually, we could reach acidic ocean temperatures everywhere which would be catastrophic, no? And it already is catastrophic in ways we've measured, for example its impact on coral reefs which are some of the more delicate habitats in our oceans.

So my claim that our oceans are "slowly becoming battery acid" isn't far from the truth if you look at the data and stop to consider what's happening.

"A 30 percent increase in the average acidity of seawater" sounds scary but it's just deceptive language. pH is a decimal logarithmic scale - fresh water is about 1000% "more acidic" than sea water (referring to the concentration of hydrogen ions). Battery acid is around 10000000000% more acidic than sea water.

At the rate mentioned in that link, 30% over 200 years, in about 2000 years the oceans will be as "acidic" as fresh water.

And if temperatures rose by 1C over that same time, is Earth slowly becoming as hot as the sun?

My second point was that the ocean doesn't literally have to become acidic in order to be catastrophic. Even a subtle change in the pH has already proven to be highly destructive to coral reef skeletons.

https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-release/scientists-iden...

Going back to the original topic, it is certainly within the realm of possibility that if temperature and pH changes can affect coral reefs, then they can alter the behaviors of warm-blooded mammals such as killer whales.

> then they can alter the behaviors of warm-blooded mammals such as killer whales.

Is that pure speculation or is there some research backing it?

Quote the whole thing:

>it is certainly within the realm of possibility that if temperature and pH changes can affect coral reefs, then they can alter the behaviors of warm-blooded mammals such as killer whales.

it is certainly within the realm of possibility

It's speculation based on reason. I don't have the ability to mind meld with the whale and have it explain to me that it's pissed off at our species and we should all listen to Greta Thunberg.

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