Humpback whales are forming super-groups
bbc.com
bbc.com
The food chain really is sun -> algae -> krill (and sometimes small fish) -> humpback whale
But they don’t eat large fish, squid regularly, or anything like seals - so they’re not “generalists” in the broad, anything-goes sense.
They’re still constrained by their baleen filter-feeding system, which limits them to tiny prey
Lots of things eat krill and small fish. They're near the bottom of the foodchain too. In addition to algae, krill are opportunistic omnivores who often consume detritus. But their primary diet is algae. Small fish tend to be pretty similar.
It's not that other things don't interact with algae or krill or small fish, it's that those groups are the foundation bedrock of the ocean ecology. And single celled organisms like algae are tough as nails in aggregate. Couldn't kill them all if we tried. Pool owners will be familiar with the struggle.
A perfect example of this is when sea otters were nearly hunted to extinction which caused sea urchins to flourish which caused the death of coral and coastal environments which started to affect the larger things that depended on those environments.
My point is that any change to the careful balance can have non-linear effects.
Like what? Emotional support dolphin?
But seriously, we may not have much choice. Natural evolution stopped being able to adapt to environmental changes after it created us; genetic engineering is essentially the only way to make biology adaptable enough again.
But since we humans are pretty arrogant with our wisdom and lack long term patience, I can see many ways where well-intended meddling can end up in catastrophe overall.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory>
Whale lifespans are long, populations and fecundity / brood sizes are small, sexual maturity relatively late, and childhood mortality relatively high. All of these make for slower rather than more rapid evolution.
Species such as krill (on which many whales feed) are far more likely to evolve rapidly in the face of increasing selection pressures. Whales might well find themselves boxed into an inescapable evolutionary corner.
We have no real frame of reference for what we've already lost.
But where does such information originate from? Is laypeople just making it up?
No it hasn't, this is climate change denialist nonsense. In fact no less a figure than ExxonMobil correctly predicted the trajectory of global CO2 levels and corresponding increase in warming as far back as the 1970s and their predictions remain accurate today.
micro-plastics into the ocean don't have a good prognosis on numbers reduction
global warming has a huge effect on oceanic life
and so on. maybe the number is much worse
No it hasn't.
>There is a federal law that prohibits people from communicating with dolphins.
>It’s called the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Signed in 1972 by President Richard Nixon, the federal law was created to protect marine mammals from being hunted, harassed, captured or killed.
>In a sense, talking to or communicating with dolphins could qualify as harassment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
>There are two levels of harassment, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Harassment at one level is considered “any act of pursuit, torment, or annoyance that has the potential to injure a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild.”
>On another level, harassment is defined by the NOAA as “acts having the potential to disturb (but not injure) a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild by disrupting behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to, migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering.”
The same goes for most of our ecological problems, really.
You must be in your territory, defending it daily from others. You must live knowing the cat sleeps 50 feet away.
Future dangers must be misty, put out of mind, lest you become paralyized with fear and inaction. To be concerned for unimmediate danger, is impossible.
We are descended from such.
Humans have a very limited capacity to be concerned too far in the future. And think, if we were, how the probabilities expand that danger the further out you go.
Then also understand that the average IQ is 100, and consider how many are below that.
So, as a chipmunk do you work diligently collecting nuts for your winter, and your family? Or do you give up some nuts for a future that is misty, distant, opaque?
Don't be too hard on people, they're only human. They're only, really, chipmunks with bigger brains. And many are trying.
And the premise is the same. If you could empathize with every person, very directly, you'd be immensely depressed. Imagine if you could literally feel the pain of every human in agony. Heck, imagine if you could feel the pain of every being in the universe. How would you not sink into a deep depression? How would you not fear every move you make?
If you felt every person dying this minute in a car crash, would you ever climb in a car? Would you even leave your house, if you felt every person who tripped and fell on stairs?
Danger must be diffuse. Empathy must exist, but also must have bounds. Just as we must be aware of the future (store food for the winter), and cannot let that drive be interfered with by distant, non-crystallized danger from the future, we cannot let empathy overwhelm our capacity to empathize beings in our immediate mental space.
By the way, this isn't saying we don't need to act. We do. However, understanding the motives behind how people behave, why they do so, and what drives them is important.
And this behaviour is quite important still. We have a massive industry around farming, for example, canning, this sort of thing. However with the further and further collapse of international shipping, and with the US withdrawing (over the last 20 years) from patrolling the world's waterways for free, shipping danger is slowly increasing as time goes on.
And of course shipping is a larger and larger concern in terms of environmental impact. Ships currently use the dirtiest, foulest, most horrid oil you can find. We've already switched to cleaning that up a bit (with perhaps unforeseen outcomes), but the entire concept of shipping massive quantities of "stuff" around is somewhat silly from an energy and environmental concern.
So we're going to slowly be moving back to local first, and that means canned food. Frozen food, such as vegetables, isn't tenable if you have to freeze them in August, and keep them frozen until June next year, at first crop.
We already have a lot of canned food, but my point is, the concept of 'manage your own food supply' is going to be a growing concern. And there was a time, a mere 100+ years ago, where most of the planet had to can their own food, and if a community ran out? Well, that was it, there was nothing to eat.
My point is, the concept of immediate danger must always supersede distant/diffuse danger.
Keep that in mind, and a lot more traction can be had.
Does it solve all the problems? No. But if you know the why of a thing, you're closer to solving the thing.
> "Don't go to these places—even though you want to, even though your family has been breeding there for generations—because that's our special whale hunting area"
And that their behaviour would change for us, that their response would simply be:
> "No worries, thanks for the heads up! Sorry for getting in the way of your harpoons"
> Bursting from their enormous lungs at over 300mph (483km/h), a humpback whale's blow can rise up to 7m (23ft) into the air.
Pick a lane BBC.
But this is great news. Also the fact that whales "transport huge amounts of nutrients across the globe" (linking to [1]) is fascinating. The role of whales in sucking up critters in one place and pooping them out elsewhere being a fundamental dynamic that drives global ocean ecosystems... just chefs kiss
[1] https://www.nature.com/research-intelligence/nri-topic-summa...)
Said from a proudly metric country, New Zealand, where everyone knows their weight in kilograms and height in feet and inches.
But whales routinely dive deep, and their tail fin is _horizontal_ and it creates powerful updrafts.
Another organism that affects mixing is apparently jellyfish.
Although there is some logic to keeping miles per hour for road speed limits as there is a big cost associated with updating all the signs and associated "documentation".
An organisation like the BBC have to make sure to use imperial measures (as well the one most people actually interact with), otherwise Reform voters have a meltdown.
Sorry. I couldn’t resist.
For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_progressive_rock_super...