The "stressed" angle is interesting, and I appreciate it since these are experts discussing the matter.
I wonder, however, if there is something more sinister at play. Orcas are very intelligent animals. Is there a chance that they knocked a lone sailor off of a boat once and found a new food source? What if they're trying to replicate previous success? The entire pod could have learned this behavior.
Orcas are known to eat large terrestrial mammals. The fact that we don't have a documented case of them eating humans doesn't mean it can't or hasn't happened.
These are the bears and lions of the sea. Except they're even smarter.
I wouldn't want to be in a small boat or kayak near orcas.
Might be hard in the era of radios - but then, perhaps they'll develop some kind of folk knowledge: "only sink the hard, noisy, floating things during storms".
Modern ships can avoid obstacles using motors and navigation, and avoid storms using weather reports. Modern ships avoid sinking by technology, not strength.
Fibreglass hulls in particular are quite fragile - especially sports hulls that are designed to be lighter.
Well, there is a constant flow of small boats crossing from Africa to Spain and Italy carrying illegal immigrants, and they sometimes capsize, or some are thrown overboard either dead[1] or alive[2] by their fellow travelers.
That would give them plenty of opportunity to learn the connection between boats and food.
However, the article notes that they do not attack the people, but the boats:
“In these and all other known cases, the mammals ignored the humans who took to life rafts; it was the boats that attracted their ire.”
> ignored the humans who took to life rafts; it was the boats that attracted their ire.
the sailboats have a streamlined "displacement" underwater body which naturally - due to optimizing for the same hydrodynamic laws - resembles large mammal body. With the stressed ecosystem - in particular lack of food to the extent threatening the very survival - attacking of your perceived competitor becomes the logical last available option.
> That would give them plenty of opportunity to learn the connection between boats and food.
The second half of the article is far more revealing, it details the state of the relationship between fishing, tourism and orcas in the Straits of Gibraltar - painting a particularly stark picture of the impact humans have had on obliterating their primary food source and dominating that area with noisy boats, their dwindling population and direct harm caused by fishing nets and hooks as they struggle to survive by picking fish from the nets instead.
If accurate it seems far more likely any animal capable of drawing a relationships between boats and other events would make the reverse relationship you are suggesting (boats steal all their food, hurt them directly, kill their young)... If I were an Orca I'd find it hard to believe I wouldn't be knocking over smaller boats out of desperation as their local population has almost vanished (30 adults last estimate).
Perhaps I'm wrong and their ability to reason on larger scales of time and space are not sufficient, but i'm pretty sure they are smart enough to know a boat is not edible - shaking humans off for food seems like a stretch but possible given they are pretty much starving, i will give you that.
Orcas are smart, and one of the things some pods have learned to do recently is to wash seals off ice floes by swimming together to create a wave. They are in dire straits, with fishing boats taking all the fish, and maybe they are trying desperate measures to find food.
The increasing migration across the Mediterranean, often in overcrowded, unseaworthy boats, raises the possibility that maybe a pod of orcas has come across a boat that is sinking, putting seal-sized, slow-moving creatures into the water...
> Orcas are smart, and one of the things some pods have learned to do recently is to wash seals off ice floes by swimming together to create a wave. They are in dire straits, with fishing boats taking all the fish, and maybe they are trying desperate measures to find food.
There is footage of this technique in BBC’s Frozen Planet, if anyone is curious to see it.
It doesn't seem as full effort as the normal ones, so they could have been training or experimenting, both of which they are known to do. They could have been play and giving a little scare as well.
To my knowledge, that is not recently learned behavior of orcas, regarding washing seals off floating ice islands.
Further, orcas are culturally separated into many groups, often called ecotypes. Although some of these ecotypes may eventually be separated into separate species, they are currently all the same species. They are able to eat whatever food and they are able to interbreed, except that they don't. These are cultural separations that orcas have created, and they are not biological.
So, certain ecotypes are fish eaters, and very particular fish eaters at that. The Southern Resident orcas in the Pacific Northwest only eat a specific type of salmon. That salmon is in major decline, and thus the orcas that eat them are in decline and for various other reasons as well such as being hunted in the 70s for capture to serve as entertainment. As far as I know, it is unknown why these orcas do not switch their food source. From what I read, these orcas performing the attacks are tuna eating orcas, so they are again fish specialists. They are likely experiencing the same threats to their food source as well.
Other ecotypes, like those that you mentioned about seals, have more diverse diets typically revolving around mammals. In the Pacific Northwest, the Southern Resident (the salmon eaters) and Transients (the mammal eaters) share the same waters but do not eat each others' foods. Since the transients have more diverse sources that are not struggling, they are not struggling like the fish eating ecotypes.
Thus, it's highly unlikely for fish eating orcas to suddenly want to eat orcas. There's multiple reasons. There is the cultural reasons, and there are also the reasons as humans are terrible meals. My own personal suspicions are that orcas are much closer to human level intelligence than anyone recognizes, and so my personal guess would be that these attacks are one of stress and aggression to prevent other animals stealing their food. It is also possible they've been able to reclaim tuna this way as well.
There are stories of orcas in the early 20th century helping whalers, but the way I read it, it was actually the orcas training the humans to help them capture and kill the whales. Orcas are intelligent enough that they understand how things work.
Sadly I can't recall the name of the book I read as a kid, but it was all about dangerous animals. The kind of stuff pre-teen boys are super into.
Well, I was hoping for adventure stories, but the book ended up being a dry and technical description of incidents. Yet, still interesting. One horror story I recall was of Orcas harassing an Inuit family in their canoe. And them having to throw one of their kids overboard to get away.
No idea idea if the stories in the book were real or made up. But just based on the dry and technical descriptions, part of me has always suspected they might have been real.
"Sedna is a giant, the daughter of the creator-god Anguta, with a great hunger that causes her to attack her parents. Angered, Anguta takes her out to sea and throws her over the side of his kayak. As she clings to the sides, he chops off her fingers and she sinks to the underworld, becoming the ruler of the monsters of the deep. Her huge fingers become the seals, walruses, and whales hunted by the Inuit." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedna_(mythology)
About a century ago on the south coast of New South Wales, A patriarch Orca named Old Tom teamed his pod up with human whalers to decimate the local baleen whale population.
He co-operated with 3 generations of a human whaling family before he died a natural death.
His skeleton remains on display in the local museum to this day.
Orcas had many chances to kill and eat humans but they never did it. They don't see us as food. Probably their intelligence makes us interesting to them. And they don't have problems getting food from any source they want, so I'd take hunger out of the equation.
According to the article, hunger is a factor stressing them out and making them more aggressive towards the boats, though as you note they don’t seem to want to eat humans:
«The orcas return to this noisy, polluted stretch of water for one reason – to feed. They specialise in hunting bluefin tuna, also highly prized by humans. The near collapse of bluefin tuna between 2005 and 2010 “has led this orca population to the very edge, with about 30 adults left”, says Pauline Gauffier, who has studied them.»
> "I’ve seen them look at boats hauling fish. I think they know that humans are somehow related to the scarcity of food"
If they are really that smart, they would be smart enough to figure out humans are made of food too, right? Some orca at some point in time would've realized it and eaten a human, yet that hasn't happened.
Hear me out: what if they don't kill us out of self preservation? They see the fishing boats, the harpoons. They even see the gigantic war ships, and are probably smart enough to realize that those are linked. Would we attract the ire of a species that is much more advanced than ours if it was just harvesting resources? Not until we're almost dead from starvation.
> Some orca at some point in time would've realized it and eaten a human, yet that hasn't happened.
There are no known attacks on humans, that doesn't mean that is hasn't happened. Orcas are generally not hunting where humans swim, and they aren't going to capsize a freighter. Plus there's better food in the water, and it's more frequent. An orca, or a family of orcas that would specialize on hunting humans would starve. We don't swim in the open sea a lot, they don't walk through towns a lot.
I believe you're over-estimating their intelligence.
Fair point about the no known attacks. There's stories about orcas killing humans in many cultures that historically interacted with killers whales.
> I believe you're over-estimating their intelligence.
One of my favourite orca stories is the killers of Eden[0]. The wiki page is short and worth a read, but to summarize: a pod of whales learns to herd whales into a bay and alert humans to them. Humans harpoon them and the pod helps drag them back by pulling on the ropes. The carcass is left overnight for the pod, that eats its lips and tongue. Afterwards, the humans haul it back.
Why would the orcas alert the humans unless they realized that the humans were responsible for the harpooning? Furthermore, just the act of slapping the river with water to attract attention is already quite advanced. And why did they only eat part of the whale (and always the same part)? Why did they never eat the humans?
I'm not trying to say that orcas aren't intelligent, they certainly are. We can cooperate with them, and they understand things, much like other dolphins do. If they weren't, you couldn't train them.
I don't believe they're "if you eat that guy over there, the navy will come and hunt us down" smart though.
They don't need to have such a clear idea of the consequences to realize it's a bad idea. Not antagonizing entities stronger than you are is a pretty basic instinct.
Stealing food from humans and annoying them is a very easy way to get food for wasps. But if they do it for long enough, the humans might decide to find their nest and eradicate the entire colony. The suggestion in this thread is that orcas are intelligent enough to realize (on any level of consciousness) this being a possibility for them if they start to harm (or even just annoy) humans.
They'd need a pretty abstract idea of strength though. The individual human isn't stronger than them at all, so they'd need to deduct that the fact that humans are using tools probably means they can also build weapons etc.
Since manual whaling hasn't happened for quite a while, they'd need to communicate abstract concepts to their offspring to keep the memory alive. It's one thing to demonstrate to them how to synchronize dives to create a wave and flush a seal off of an ice sheet, it's quite another to explain the process of humans hunting them with ships and harpoons and indicating that humanity's technology has progressed.
They have language we haven't decoded yet. Even if their language is very simple, it could suffice for this. A young orca calf could say "Food?" and receive the response "NO!" They could then repeat this to future generations.
In a sense, yes, but not a prohibitive one. Boats and fishing equipment are obviously tools that orcas are familiar with. They would basically see fishing equipment in particular as weapons already. These are things that orcas know they can't build. They're weird and scary in at least the sense that bats and aliens are weird to us. It's not a huge abstract leap from that to "let's not mess with these guys".
Think about how you feel approaching a very large animal, like a horse you don't know. You don't need to know how or even if it can hurt you, but it's worth being careful. If you know the animal has sharp points (like a large dog), even more so. I think sparrows avoid cars by similar logic.
I really think non-verbal, subconscious intelligence is capable of a lot more abstraction than people think. We need language to describe it, but not to do it. "Threat" is an abstraction that lots of simple animals handle just fine. It's not so much that we need to give animals more credit than that we give ourselves too much. Our actual motivations are usually much simpler than the stories we tell ourselves.
Absolutely. I am scared of spiders because my mother is scared of spiders, not because she told me to be scared of spiders. Quite the opposite: knowing arachnaphobia is an irrational fear (at least in the UK), she tried very hard not to pass it on to her children, but the body language of fear must be near impossible to hide from a child.
Spiders are actually a really good example of this principle.
What's really interesting here is the problem of just a "naive threat estimation", which usually is always just estimating the purely mechanical danger the body of a foe could pose. We have a healthy respect for large animals like horses and cattle that could crush us. We've got an open fear of predators with obvious sharp teeth and such (wolves, big cats, crocodilians). But bugs? Bugs are really weird because they're not mechanically dangerous, and as, say, a child, sizing them up, there's no sensible reason to be scared.
I find it really interesting how - even without necessarily understanding that they've got poison, we as a species do a really good job of being scared of "things that aren't visually obvious threats" like this - especially in kids, who really struggle to "get it" when it comes to what's actually dangerous about, say, a spider or a jellyfish.
I think you really hit on something there - I think a little bit of it is actually a built-in instinctual fear, but there's also a huge part that's an imitative fear kids pick up from anything that the body language of a parent conveys as dangerous.
I agree. Orcas are known to have multi-generational culture to at least a limited extent; perhaps orcas remember commercial whaling and know humans are skilled at killing whales when we choose to. Or maybe they could work that out just by observing what we can do today.
I doubt attacking humans would be good for orcas in the long run, and perhaps their intellect allows them to generally understand this while sharks don't. (Orcas don't even nibble on humans out of curiosity, so how would they know we don't taste delicious? In this regard sharks seem more curious than orcas, which is seems strange since they're otherwise very curious animals.)
A great white shark's liver is huge, heavy, and oily. I'm not sure an orca could physically even accomplish the task of separating out a human liver and if it did, it sure wouldn't be satisfying.
Orcas don't eat typically humans, there are many examples of them not doing this when they could have. I have no evidence to support this, but if they're intelligent enough to have culture differences between pods, they might be intelligent enough to tell stories about the animals in boats on the surface and how they seem harmless, but if you attack one of them, the entire tribe of them will come and wipe out your entire family as retribution.
Different groups of orcas have very different diets to the point where for example dolphins know it's safe to hang out with some pods but not others. Since they are very cautious and picky eaters, its possible humans were avoided but now a group has added them as OK food
Orcas are picky eaters, especially the ones that feed on fish like the Gibraltar orcas. There have been an enormous number of human-orca interactions both in the wild and in captivity, and even in the only known attacks on humans- the Sea World attacks- no orca has ever eaten a human. The likelihood that the fish-eating Gibraltar orcas are attempting to eat people is extremely low, IMO. It's much more likely an attempt to simply kill due to stress, like the Sea World orca attacks.
If you see blackfish take in mind that must not be seen as an honest bona-fide documentary. Is entertaining if you understand what it really is. A fictionary monster's film.
I would define it as a "blaxfishploitation" film. A new genre aimed to attract animal activists, tell them what they want to hear, and sell a rewarding sense of outrage.
In order to get the desired emotional response, the film is trying to mislead the viewer all the time and takes a lot of creative licenses.
Like experts talking about an orca specimen or an event, even if they never worked with orcas or had been fired decades before the arrival of the whale (so didn't have direct experience with neither the whale, nor the event). Of course they will not mention this little details in the film.
Or mixing footage of people and orcas in different years and pools, to make it seem as if they are interacting in the same pool at the same time.
Or inserting a few frames of whales jumping (as a normal part of the show) in the middle of an interview, to suggest a unexpected attack
Or putting words in the mouth of Sea World staff to make them appear as evil, but were debunked later as false, with data.
Or telling that they lied and covered facts in a trial, even if the real declarations where videotaped and show the opposite.
The number of inaccuracies and false claimings does not end here. Here is a list with 69 points (that for a film of just 90 minutes is pretty astonishing):
I understand that is the nature of documentary film making, non-fiction literature, and frankly even photography. Typically anything very engaging has an editorial slant. And personally I'm not terribly sympathetic with a radical animal rights agenda.
However, the "69 errors in 90 minutes" link you attached is an exercise in legalistic hair splitting which really does little to undermine the theme of the movie.
Some could say that the main theme of the movie is "how to exploit a sad and emotional event (involving an orca trainer young woman killed by a whale, and her naive co-workers), to make money, get fame and earn awards" [1]. Not more, not less.
Unfortunately, the cut made by blaxfishploitation was deep and still bleeds today.
To start, Killer wales aren't reproduced in Sea World anymore [2]. This is bad, not good. There are less orcas in the planet.
The damage caused by this film to cetacean research, understanding, and conservation is irreversible. To study wild lions is one thing, to study wild cetaceans is a totally different one. Is much more difficult and field studies at open sea are really expensive. At this moment, we don't even know how many species of Killer whales remain in the planet.
Campaigns to release all captive whales proliferated forcing to the release to some whales by "humanitary" reasons, with the logical result of its death. Good job. Leaving your pooch in a forest so it can run free and make frienship with their brothers wolves, would achieve the same result.
At least one species of dolphin got extinct in our lifetime, something that didn't happened before in all the history of humanity. Other cetaceans are about to vanish forever and do you know what? We can not even talk about breeding cetaceans in captivity without being harassed and called assassins of babies, and Gabriela Cowperthwaite has some responsibility for that, in my opinion.
In 2015 a man drove to a Spanish airport with a ticket to fly to US, but didn't took the plane. Some days later was found dead inside his car.
Jose Luis Barbero worked as dolphin's trainer in Marineland Mallorca until 2015 (two years after blackfish was released). He has an extensive professional experience starting in the 80's, and received the 'Best Trainer' award from the International Marine Trainer's Association IMATA in 1992. He implemented also a swimming with dolphins program as therapy for children autistic and down syndrome.
In 2015 he received an offer for becoming vicepresident to the Georgia's Aquarium in Atlanta and was about to get interviewed for his longtime dream job.
At this moment, an harassment campaign against him started in internet tagging him as animal abuser. A video showing supposedly the proofs was uploaded to internet, and spread like fire for all news, creating a lot of buzz, and surfing in the same wave of outrage that blackfish created.
They video supposedly shows a young Jose Luis kicking and shouting dolphins in a trainer session. Calling it nasty things like "tonto" (dumb) and "vago" (lazy) that could lead to severe depression to any spanish speaker dolphin.
Of course with blackfish spreading rage and justice fire, something like a "swim with dolphins" program was unacceptable and frowned upon by the public: Dolphins could kill people. It seems that the same public don't see any problem with the concept of therapy dogs or horses, even if dogs and horses kill each year thousands of people (and dolphins kill zero). But dolphins are magical mystic non-human humans that came from outer space and appear in all psychodelic posters, and dogs are... just dogs, I suppose.
The association SOS delfines sued Barbero by animal abuse and for violating the law in the therapy dolphins program, and he and his family received the usual package of sadistic death menaces on internet.
The Atlanta's aquarium received a lot of mails threatening with a boycott campaign if they dare to hire him. Afraid of the consequences, they removed the hiring offer, and the rest is known.
Personally I think that the video was clearly fake. Audio and video don't match clearly. The supposed 'kick' to dolphins does not look at all like a kick, and the silhouettes in the video could belong to anybody. As proof of anything would be seen as a highly suspiciously doctored one... but it does not change a bit the fact that it caused real and massive damage in the life of this man without any real possibility of defense.
And if it were real, wow, somebody really hated this man!. Such old video was reserved for decades to be released with surgical precision at the exact time that could do more harm to him?. If the goal was stopping animal abuse, why they waited for decades instead to denounce it ASAP?. This seems a pretty miserable act to me.
Nobody was sued for deliberately destroying the professional reputation of a man, harassing his family and driving him to commit suicide in a parking's airport.
After the "ca-ching" opportunity dissapeared, SOS delfines go 'shalalala' in silent mode. Everybody enjoys a good twitter witch hunt before dinner (It makes you feel morally better than the other guys). The bad man died, hurrah! Isn't marvellous animalism?
FTA: “They target the orca, because they think there must be tuna under the pods,” says Jörn Selling, a marine biologist for Firmm whale watching and research foundation with 17 years’ experience in the Straits. “They go right through the pods, their hooks cutting the dorsal fins”.
[…]
But many conservationists suspect some fishermen retaliate violently”
I think it’s at least equally likely they learned that boats of a certain size in the neighborhood of tuna can attack their family, and do this to protect it.
If we take your supposition as true for the sake of argument, what else would have to be true? I think specifically any boat smaller than 50' would then become a target. As there are many, many boats in the Mediterranean that are much smaller, and easily overwhelmed by Orcas, if your idea was accurate the report would include many events of people being lost and their boats being damaged.
Those things haven't appeared in the press. As a result I'd guess that something more specific about these boats, or maybe this place, that has them attacking.
These are highly intelligent animals with complex behavior and in general, they are pretty friendly to humans. I suspect that the pod in the article has some powerful reason for attacking boats.
See my comment below, but orcas do not switch up their food source very readily unless they are in an ecotype similar to the transients found in the Pacific Northwest. Orcas that specialize in fish do not switch up, even in the face of dire straits, even though they could. This is at least so far. Orcas' splitting up into ecotypes is almost solely cultural and not biological, and so even though we wish orcas wouldn't have to struggle, I feel we could potentially see them adapt to other food sources, but that so far has not been observed.
The orcas that eat mammals have more varied diets and thus hunting techniques, since their food source requires that (mammals are smart, have good eyesight and hearing, etc.).
The article offers some anecdotes, but nothing to support the claim that attacks have been "unusual" in the past or are increasing in number. There's no sense of whether this is still an isolated problem, whether it has exploded in recent years, or whether there's anything that connects these attacks with attacks in other places.
Local coast guards might keep track of this sort of information. But there's nothing about that one way or the other in the article.
Without some quantitative handle, it's impossible to even know whether something unusual is happening here.
There are no statistics because this has never been reported before. One of the key points that animal rights activists used to shut down the Sea World orca performances was that there were no reports of wild orcas ever attacking humans, indicating that the Sea World orcas must be extremely stressed. Wild orcas have had many friendly interactions with human boats, and have even successfully stolen fish from fishing boats many times, but as a layman who follows orca intelligence research as a hobby, I've never heard of attack-like incidents like this article describes before. And the scientists interviewed in the article evidently haven't either.
"Rocío Espada works with the marine biology laboratory at the University of Seville and has observed this migratory population of orca in the Gibraltar Straits for years. She was astonished. “For killer whales to take out a piece of a fibreglass rudder is crazy,” she says. “I’ve seen these orcas grow from babies, I know their life stories, I’ve never seen or heard of attacks.”"
TFA: In 1972 the Robertson family from Staffordshire were shipwrecked off the Galapagos Islands after an orca strike (their book, Survive the Savage Sea became a classic).
I think these are attacks by a population that's starving to death, surrounded by deafening noise (and remember, their primary sense is hearing) and poisoned by heavy metals accumulating in the food chain. I think they understand that humans and boats are responsible for the stress they're experiencing, and are attacking smaller boats that they think they can sink in desperation or anger, similar to how Tilikum snapped one day and killed Dawn Brancheau.
The southern residents of the Pacific Northwest are the most studied population of wild of orcas in the world (actually, they're probably the most studied population of wild mammals). They seem to have a lot of similarities to the Gibraltar orcas- both seem to eat fish exclusively, and in fact heavily specialize in one large fish species (Chinook salmon for the southern residents, bluefin tuna for the Gibraltar orcas). Both populations appear heavily stressed due to human activity, especially food loss due to fishing, and both have experienced a crash in successful pregnancies. In the southern residents, two years ago this led to Talequah making news by carrying her dead calf for two weeks over hundreds of miles, seemingly in mourning. I think these attacks are also basically emotional and based on a correct general understanding of how boats are affecting them, and not especially different from what humans would do in a similar situation.
Orcas are known to be highly intelligent and are also known to be able to operate on a pretty decent level of thinking. Seeing boats take your food while you starve is not a difficult conclusion to draw that the boats are total assholes who need to be taught a lesson.
I remember learning Humpbacks work to deny Orcas meals sometimes. I can totally imagine Orcas connecting the dots to attack smaller boats. If anything it could just be stress + source of noise == bad.
A young male orca and its mother kills a orca baby by drowning it during four hours, with the baby orca's mother nearby.
The researchers are guessing they did it so that the other mother orca that had just had its baby killed could be impregnated by the young male orca, thereby making sure that its genetics would be spread.
Why are humans that catch the food they need to survive total assholes, but the oracs who need to catch the food they need to survive are not total assholes?
Unfortunately, this is a sample size of 1, so it's hard to know what's different about this pod versus all the other pods that have interacted frequently with boats without attacking them. But we do know that this population is much more stressed by human behavior than most orca populations.
I used to have two dogs. They would check if they were given equal amounts of food and would protest otherwise. Seems logical that Orcas, a much more intelligent animal, would understand that the boats are eating their food.
As someone who regularly prods Juniors to see what they're making in case they get taken for rides like I did, I hope I'm not in the minority of saying yes; that's getting a bit beyond the issue at matter though as I'm pretty sure that the Orca were not consulted as to how they thought it would be most fair to divide up the spoils of the natural world.
Someone once described the sound small boats make underwater as "snakes" or "parsel tongue" to me after being underwater when a boat happened to pass by.
Propellers are pretty noisy, even when they're not singing (a common flaw - look it up). As divers, we appreciate the warning, but also known how far this noise carries even to our human ears, which are poorly attuned to the environment.
Animals in general, whether Humans or Orcas, don't grant members of other species special understanding or consideration and are usually very ruthless. It's the biological norm, and not unique to humanity. Humans are unique in that we do hesitate before killing and eating another species' babies, and we prefer not to play with our prey before the kill.
That exceptionalism only really applies to in-person encounters. If it's out of sight, out of mind, then we're as indifferent as any other.
The meat industry hasn't been completely taken over by robots yet. Humans are still doing the killing, especially with calves. Tribes that heavily rely on hunt won't hesitate much either.
Regarding playing with our prey, we elevated it to sport and culture (Fox hunting for example). Not even for sustenance, just entertainment.
> Animals in general, whether Humans or Orcas, don't grant members of other species special understanding or consideration and are usually very ruthless.
Since this is a thread about Orcas, Orcas are extremely friendly to humans and there are no reported human deaths from wild orcas. There's countless videos you can observe yourself of them playing with kayakers, boats, or even kids scratching the orca's tongue. Hardly would consider that "very ruthless."
That they have feelings is easy, of course they do. Whether they coincide exactly, or even mostly, with that of the human experience, is very non-obvious.
I think "had enough" is easily the most plausible reason, and it's time we acknowledged that we don't have a monopoly on intelligence, feelings or personality. We need to recognition the message and do something about what we are doing to their environment.
Visiting the whale museums and community-based orca tracking efforts in the Pacific Northwest has made me feel much more connected to the issues in our marine environment, which are easy to ignore because they are hidden from plain view. These issues are also more painful when it concerns orcas, because of how intelligent, social, and like us they are.
Food is certainly a problem, and the one that gets the most attention. But there are significant issues in noise pollution as well. For example, if you listen to recordings of sounds in the Puget Sound / Salish Sea, you'll be stunned at just how loud boat traffic noise can be (https://vimeo.com/247051394). I imagine this is just plainly torturous to animals, particularly social ones that communicate through vocalizations. There's also the risk of sonar testing (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/orca-endangered-killer-whale-ri...). You can learn more about this in the documentary "Sonic Sea" (https://www.sonicsea.org/).
I wonder if there is some kind of noise generator that a small boat could carry that would repel, but not harm, enraged orcas. Maybe there's a whale equivalent of nails-on-chalkboard that would work without being loud enough to do damage or require too much energy to be practical.
If there is an attractive rather than repellent sound that would work (a calf in distress?) maybe it could lure the grampus away with a little remote control boat.
But their intelligence might make whatever does work only temporarily effective.
Not saying I give credence to the original comment about noise being the cause but most cruising sailboats have engines and in the Mediterranean they are used quite often because the wind is often not sufficient to sail. The Mediterranean is called the Med for short and there is a joke that Med actually stands for "Motor Every Day".
I see a lot of crazy speculation in these comments. Seems to me they are just attacking a competitor, something almost all animals do in some fashion. They aren't dumb but they aren't human either. They don't have our motivations.
On TikTok I saw a man drop is cellphone into the water. A watching Beluga promptly swam over, picked up in his mouth and delivered to him. It was amazing.
The animal clearly saw the man drop the item, but also seemed to be aware of the man's inability to fetch it, and that perhaps it was a 'possession' of some kind.
It seems ver reasonable to me that mammals have emotions, memories, and rational emotional response. If they were 'hurt' by a boat it seems super rational to me that they would be angered by or dislike boats. I suspect they are aware 'boats do fishing' and can directly correlate their hunger to the boats.
I don't know why this isn't the first response, and is considered 'unscientific' in the article.
Hardly. It sounds much more like simply respecting their intelligence and their drive to defend themselves rather than thinking of them as dumb things. The Gaia hypothesis is more about ecological interconnectivity and wholes rather than parts and both are missing from GPs statement. The idea that orcas have agency doesn't depend on whether its useful to think of entire ecosystems as having agency or not.
There is a component of the Gaia hypothesis which seems anthropomorphic, but this is a reductive way of understanding the theory.
The way you need to understand it is that most natural systems implement homeostasis on multiple scales, and information transferred between organisms has a somewhat communicable nature because organisms evolved and competed within a shared environment -- e.g human beings proteins are responses to environmental conditions.
I agree that that is a better understanding of what is being proposed but feel it could have been phrased with less presumption about my understanding as it comes off a bit condescending. I didn't intend to rule that out, nor go into detail. I hinted at what you're saying in referring to holism.
This is such an embarrassing comment -- for all the collective intelligence in this community the often-exhibited lack of imagination is painful. You've spent your life building/managing/working with complex systems and you cannot see the planet as the same thing?
FWIW, although I don't subscribe to Gaia Theory, I thought this was a perfectly fine comment and the commenter who called it embarrassing was being a jerk.
Seems mind-boggling to me that the article mentions, but makes no comment whatsoever on, the fact that in every case the boat was turned around. Like not just turned, but turned 180 degrees or close to it. Just in case you've been locked in a geometry classroom since birth, 180º is what we out here might refer to as "back the way you came." Orcas be like: "Hey, nice to see you, welcome to our feeding area, too bad you can't stay, here's your coat & hat, don't let the door hit you etc etc!"
I certainly wouldn't want to imply in the slightest that huuu-mons are narcissistic or focused only on themselves (like "ouch the kick from the shotgun hurt my thumb" is how we might summarize a shot that ruined the lives of an entire pheasant family), but would we be sad to find out that things like "attacking us" and "scaring us", "and making us feel totally powerless by breaking our rudder," all of which figure prominently in the human experience of the encounter, don't even merit a mention in the orca newspaper article about it? Could it be that the orca newspaper article (just bear with me for chrissakes) simply says "Another Boat Found in Feeding Area" and goes on to describe how so-and-so and his crew followed procedure and first broke the rudder, which they've figured out seems to be a prerequisite for taking over steering, and then turned the intruder away?
Absolute shot in the dark, I have near-zero knowledge of Orca and even less about sailing...but I did notice one common link in the article. They were using autohelms. Are the ones they are using commercial ones? Are they homebrew (which is becoming more common in the raspi world)?
Could it be that the PWM motor control on the autohelm is bothering them...it could resonate down the rudder and essentially make a speaker. Once the Orca destroy the sound they seem to be leaving.
Again...total shot in the dark. Just trying to spur some thought in other directions.
On the one hand, I have a hard time imagining that noise being more bothersome than the motor of powered boats, but with a sample size of two, it fits the data as well as any other theory.
Having said that, I think the simplest explanation for targeting sailboats is simply that the orcas are less likely to be injured by the motor, and it doesn't blast deafening static when you get close to it.
It has no motor sound...but has a varying "whine". Also, when the rudder is bumped that whine is going to change due to attempting to realign...which could sound like an injured cry.
I know people younger than me complain about the pwm sound from my stepper drivers on my printers...but I cannot hear it.
nearly all leisure boats on a long passage would be using an autopilot of some kind though and the vast majority of those are electric motor driven. perhaps the sample is pre-selected to have autohelm in that case..
I wouldn't say "vast" majority. Windvane self-steering gear is quite common on long distance cruising sailboats. I would personally not rely solely on an autopilot, though it's nice to have in addition, for when motoring.
The exception might be an RPi driven DIY autopilot where you can carry spare actuators (and spare RPi's), but that still requires electricity so would be useless in an emergency where you lose power (thunder strike or water shorting the batteries).
All in all I find it weird why this is happening now all of a sudden . We've been overfishing for decades and it's not like there's been a large increase in maritime activity lately.
Mybe they just finally had enough and snapped.. Would hate to see the sea become a hostile environment for humans, but we also have it coming.
> Are they homebrew (which is becoming more common in the raspi world)?
Homemade autopilots are unfortunately still quite rare, although the technology does exist. You basically need an RPi, a motor controller and a motor, with Pypilot as software.
> Reports of orcas striking sailing boats in the Straits of Gibraltar have left sailors and scientists confused. Just what is causing such unusually aggressive behaviour?
We don't know if orcas are "stressed" or if they're having fun, or if they patiently, rationally decided to wage a war against humans on boats.
Adding "stressed" in the title is a judgment call, and a condescending one.
I'm the submitter. The whole second half of the article details the ways in which this orca population is stressed. It describes how their population has rapidly declined, they have much less food and there is evidence of them suffering injury from fishing nets and lines and possibly attacks from fishermen. Not to mention the noise and pollution generated by the heavy traffic in that stretch of water. Stressed then is an objective description and not 'a condescending one'.
Anyway, the title has been changed now. I don't mind but I don't think adding stressed was unfair, given the details of stress described in the article I have outlined above.
In case it gives some HNers joy, India now recognizes Orcas as non-human person [0]. India is the fourth country in the world to ban the capture and import of cetaceans for the purpose of commercial entertainment - along with Costa Rica, Hungary, and Chile. Me thinks that it is about time.
It seems backwards, to me, and I suspect it will be widely viewed as backwards in the distant future. Why a top-down approach? Countless other species are sentient like orcas are, even if they may not be quite as cognitively adept as orcas at certain tasks or quite as fortunate to receive the same amkunt of marketing and PR.
Why is this a default deny policy, with just a few exceptions for the tiny few species we feel hold the relative position of more valuable than other species? If orcas never existed, would they award their runner-up the get-out-of-kill-free card instead?
I think it should be the inverse, with extremely rigorous criteria and years of deliberation over which species to exclude, rather than which ones to include. Don't get me wrong, I prefer one over none, but it feels a little bit like Saudi Arabia finally permitting women to drive and then showering them with praise for their admirable feminist ethos.
I don't know when the day might come, but I think it's inevitable in the long run that this inverted approach will be what almost everyone does and almost everyone will be absolutely baffled and mortified that it used to be done any other way. I don't know whether or not any of us will live to see that day, but I'm prety confident it'll happen eventually.
I believe there was a story some years ago about a sail boat in the pacific, about a day's sail from the Panama Canal that was broken up by a pod of killer whales.
"But they are attacking _our boats_!! We need to do something!"
in believe how there is some evil animal out there, simply out to take away their fun. Then they arm themselves up with harpoons, because:
"Well, not going to shoot them, _unless_ they attack my boat!! It's only self-defense!"
Just like with people, who need to go where polar bears are and arm themselves with rifles, because they might "have no choice" when attacked by starving polar bear.
This is so short sighted. For those people, all that counts is their "fun" while on this planet. They pay for some service, that is available and don't feel any responsibility. Perhaps simply don't f* go there and have fun somewhere else?! But no, fun is more important than the life of endangered species, so these kind of tours are still offered. Money can be made. Money, you understand? Omg it's money!
It's disgusting and I believe, that no one has the right to shoot a polar bear, even in self-defense. Please simply die, get eaten, instead of killing one of those endangered beings. There are enough humans here, we don't need you and neither does this planet.
I’ll read through that article but since the article discusses a general dynamic it’s fair to reason about whether and to what extent that dynamic is in play in a given particular context . It seems that the point of ‘contention’ here is food scarcity and competition for Tuna, and it seems the orca are losing the point and either the humans have acquired the role of apex predator in that particular part of the ocean or at the least the orcas’ services as such are no longer required.
It may be that reading this article will provide the wherewithal to answer this question but perhaps there’s someone here who understands the particulars and can shed some light.
167 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 60.1 ms ] threadI wonder, however, if there is something more sinister at play. Orcas are very intelligent animals. Is there a chance that they knocked a lone sailor off of a boat once and found a new food source? What if they're trying to replicate previous success? The entire pod could have learned this behavior.
Orcas are known to eat large terrestrial mammals. The fact that we don't have a documented case of them eating humans doesn't mean it can't or hasn't happened.
These are the bears and lions of the sea. Except they're even smarter.
I wouldn't want to be in a small boat or kayak near orcas.
Modern ships can avoid obstacles using motors and navigation, and avoid storms using weather reports. Modern ships avoid sinking by technology, not strength.
Fibreglass hulls in particular are quite fragile - especially sports hulls that are designed to be lighter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Alexander_(ship)
Sperm whales ramming ships that attack them seems less remarkable than whales in general attacking ships during the wooden ship whaling era.
Update: The article on the Essex mentions quite a few more incidents, but still only a handful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)
[1] https://elpais.com/espana/2020-08-07/se-les-acabo-el-agua-ti... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32337725
That would give them plenty of opportunity to learn the connection between boats and food.
However, the article notes that they do not attack the people, but the boats: “In these and all other known cases, the mammals ignored the humans who took to life rafts; it was the boats that attracted their ire.”
the sailboats have a streamlined "displacement" underwater body which naturally - due to optimizing for the same hydrodynamic laws - resembles large mammal body. With the stressed ecosystem - in particular lack of food to the extent threatening the very survival - attacking of your perceived competitor becomes the logical last available option.
The second half of the article is far more revealing, it details the state of the relationship between fishing, tourism and orcas in the Straits of Gibraltar - painting a particularly stark picture of the impact humans have had on obliterating their primary food source and dominating that area with noisy boats, their dwindling population and direct harm caused by fishing nets and hooks as they struggle to survive by picking fish from the nets instead.
If accurate it seems far more likely any animal capable of drawing a relationships between boats and other events would make the reverse relationship you are suggesting (boats steal all their food, hurt them directly, kill their young)... If I were an Orca I'd find it hard to believe I wouldn't be knocking over smaller boats out of desperation as their local population has almost vanished (30 adults last estimate).
Perhaps I'm wrong and their ability to reason on larger scales of time and space are not sufficient, but i'm pretty sure they are smart enough to know a boat is not edible - shaking humans off for food seems like a stretch but possible given they are pretty much starving, i will give you that.
They work in teams in a truly impressive manner. They teach their young the skills of their pods.
If I were to bet orcas are second smartest species on this planet.
The increasing migration across the Mediterranean, often in overcrowded, unseaworthy boats, raises the possibility that maybe a pod of orcas has come across a boat that is sinking, putting seal-sized, slow-moving creatures into the water...
There is footage of this technique in BBC’s Frozen Planet, if anyone is curious to see it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRu3LGceAg
It doesn't seem as full effort as the normal ones, so they could have been training or experimenting, both of which they are known to do. They could have been play and giving a little scare as well.
Further, orcas are culturally separated into many groups, often called ecotypes. Although some of these ecotypes may eventually be separated into separate species, they are currently all the same species. They are able to eat whatever food and they are able to interbreed, except that they don't. These are cultural separations that orcas have created, and they are not biological.
So, certain ecotypes are fish eaters, and very particular fish eaters at that. The Southern Resident orcas in the Pacific Northwest only eat a specific type of salmon. That salmon is in major decline, and thus the orcas that eat them are in decline and for various other reasons as well such as being hunted in the 70s for capture to serve as entertainment. As far as I know, it is unknown why these orcas do not switch their food source. From what I read, these orcas performing the attacks are tuna eating orcas, so they are again fish specialists. They are likely experiencing the same threats to their food source as well.
Other ecotypes, like those that you mentioned about seals, have more diverse diets typically revolving around mammals. In the Pacific Northwest, the Southern Resident (the salmon eaters) and Transients (the mammal eaters) share the same waters but do not eat each others' foods. Since the transients have more diverse sources that are not struggling, they are not struggling like the fish eating ecotypes.
Thus, it's highly unlikely for fish eating orcas to suddenly want to eat orcas. There's multiple reasons. There is the cultural reasons, and there are also the reasons as humans are terrible meals. My own personal suspicions are that orcas are much closer to human level intelligence than anyone recognizes, and so my personal guess would be that these attacks are one of stress and aggression to prevent other animals stealing their food. It is also possible they've been able to reclaim tuna this way as well.
There are stories of orcas in the early 20th century helping whalers, but the way I read it, it was actually the orcas training the humans to help them capture and kill the whales. Orcas are intelligent enough that they understand how things work.
Well, I was hoping for adventure stories, but the book ended up being a dry and technical description of incidents. Yet, still interesting. One horror story I recall was of Orcas harassing an Inuit family in their canoe. And them having to throw one of their kids overboard to get away.
No idea idea if the stories in the book were real or made up. But just based on the dry and technical descriptions, part of me has always suspected they might have been real.
Hmmm. "If you don't behave, we'll give you to the Orcas..." sounds like the kind of thing some pissed off parents would tell their kids.
He co-operated with 3 generations of a human whaling family before he died a natural death.
His skeleton remains on display in the local museum to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tom_(killer_whale)
edit: longer story about him;
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-lege...
Orcas had many chances to kill and eat humans but they never did it. They don't see us as food. Probably their intelligence makes us interesting to them. And they don't have problems getting food from any source they want, so I'd take hunger out of the equation.
«The orcas return to this noisy, polluted stretch of water for one reason – to feed. They specialise in hunting bluefin tuna, also highly prized by humans. The near collapse of bluefin tuna between 2005 and 2010 “has led this orca population to the very edge, with about 30 adults left”, says Pauline Gauffier, who has studied them.»
> "I’ve seen them look at boats hauling fish. I think they know that humans are somehow related to the scarcity of food"
If they are really that smart, they would be smart enough to figure out humans are made of food too, right? Some orca at some point in time would've realized it and eaten a human, yet that hasn't happened.
Hear me out: what if they don't kill us out of self preservation? They see the fishing boats, the harpoons. They even see the gigantic war ships, and are probably smart enough to realize that those are linked. Would we attract the ire of a species that is much more advanced than ours if it was just harvesting resources? Not until we're almost dead from starvation.
There are no known attacks on humans, that doesn't mean that is hasn't happened. Orcas are generally not hunting where humans swim, and they aren't going to capsize a freighter. Plus there's better food in the water, and it's more frequent. An orca, or a family of orcas that would specialize on hunting humans would starve. We don't swim in the open sea a lot, they don't walk through towns a lot.
I believe you're over-estimating their intelligence.
> I believe you're over-estimating their intelligence.
One of my favourite orca stories is the killers of Eden[0]. The wiki page is short and worth a read, but to summarize: a pod of whales learns to herd whales into a bay and alert humans to them. Humans harpoon them and the pod helps drag them back by pulling on the ropes. The carcass is left overnight for the pod, that eats its lips and tongue. Afterwards, the humans haul it back.
Why would the orcas alert the humans unless they realized that the humans were responsible for the harpooning? Furthermore, just the act of slapping the river with water to attract attention is already quite advanced. And why did they only eat part of the whale (and always the same part)? Why did they never eat the humans?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...
I don't believe they're "if you eat that guy over there, the navy will come and hunt us down" smart though.
See, something insects don't get.
Since manual whaling hasn't happened for quite a while, they'd need to communicate abstract concepts to their offspring to keep the memory alive. It's one thing to demonstrate to them how to synchronize dives to create a wave and flush a seal off of an ice sheet, it's quite another to explain the process of humans hunting them with ships and harpoons and indicating that humanity's technology has progressed.
Think about how you feel approaching a very large animal, like a horse you don't know. You don't need to know how or even if it can hurt you, but it's worth being careful. If you know the animal has sharp points (like a large dog), even more so. I think sparrows avoid cars by similar logic.
I really think non-verbal, subconscious intelligence is capable of a lot more abstraction than people think. We need language to describe it, but not to do it. "Threat" is an abstraction that lots of simple animals handle just fine. It's not so much that we need to give animals more credit than that we give ourselves too much. Our actual motivations are usually much simpler than the stories we tell ourselves.
What's really interesting here is the problem of just a "naive threat estimation", which usually is always just estimating the purely mechanical danger the body of a foe could pose. We have a healthy respect for large animals like horses and cattle that could crush us. We've got an open fear of predators with obvious sharp teeth and such (wolves, big cats, crocodilians). But bugs? Bugs are really weird because they're not mechanically dangerous, and as, say, a child, sizing them up, there's no sensible reason to be scared.
I find it really interesting how - even without necessarily understanding that they've got poison, we as a species do a really good job of being scared of "things that aren't visually obvious threats" like this - especially in kids, who really struggle to "get it" when it comes to what's actually dangerous about, say, a spider or a jellyfish.
I think you really hit on something there - I think a little bit of it is actually a built-in instinctual fear, but there's also a huge part that's an imitative fear kids pick up from anything that the body language of a parent conveys as dangerous.
I doubt attacking humans would be good for orcas in the long run, and perhaps their intellect allows them to generally understand this while sharks don't. (Orcas don't even nibble on humans out of curiosity, so how would they know we don't taste delicious? In this regard sharks seem more curious than orcas, which is seems strange since they're otherwise very curious animals.)
The Sea World orca Tilikum killed three people, though not for eating.
If you see blackfish take in mind that must not be seen as an honest bona-fide documentary. Is entertaining if you understand what it really is. A fictionary monster's film.
I would define it as a "blaxfishploitation" film. A new genre aimed to attract animal activists, tell them what they want to hear, and sell a rewarding sense of outrage.
In order to get the desired emotional response, the film is trying to mislead the viewer all the time and takes a lot of creative licenses.
Like experts talking about an orca specimen or an event, even if they never worked with orcas or had been fired decades before the arrival of the whale (so didn't have direct experience with neither the whale, nor the event). Of course they will not mention this little details in the film.
Or mixing footage of people and orcas in different years and pools, to make it seem as if they are interacting in the same pool at the same time.
Or inserting a few frames of whales jumping (as a normal part of the show) in the middle of an interview, to suggest a unexpected attack
Or putting words in the mouth of Sea World staff to make them appear as evil, but were debunked later as false, with data.
Or telling that they lied and covered facts in a trial, even if the real declarations where videotaped and show the opposite.
The number of inaccuracies and false claimings does not end here. Here is a list with 69 points (that for a film of just 90 minutes is pretty astonishing):
http://da15bdaf715461308003-0c725c907c2d637068751776aeee5fbf...
However, the "69 errors in 90 minutes" link you attached is an exercise in legalistic hair splitting which really does little to undermine the theme of the movie.
Unfortunately, the cut made by blaxfishploitation was deep and still bleeds today.
To start, Killer wales aren't reproduced in Sea World anymore [2]. This is bad, not good. There are less orcas in the planet.
The damage caused by this film to cetacean research, understanding, and conservation is irreversible. To study wild lions is one thing, to study wild cetaceans is a totally different one. Is much more difficult and field studies at open sea are really expensive. At this moment, we don't even know how many species of Killer whales remain in the planet.
Campaigns to release all captive whales proliferated forcing to the release to some whales by "humanitary" reasons, with the logical result of its death. Good job. Leaving your pooch in a forest so it can run free and make frienship with their brothers wolves, would achieve the same result.
At least one species of dolphin got extinct in our lifetime, something that didn't happened before in all the history of humanity. Other cetaceans are about to vanish forever and do you know what? We can not even talk about breeding cetaceans in captivity without being harassed and called assassins of babies, and Gabriela Cowperthwaite has some responsibility for that, in my opinion.
[1] https://www.micechat.com/53915-blackfish-exposed/
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35829477
But hold, on. The history still can be more sinister...
Jose Luis Barbero worked as dolphin's trainer in Marineland Mallorca until 2015 (two years after blackfish was released). He has an extensive professional experience starting in the 80's, and received the 'Best Trainer' award from the International Marine Trainer's Association IMATA in 1992. He implemented also a swimming with dolphins program as therapy for children autistic and down syndrome.
In 2015 he received an offer for becoming vicepresident to the Georgia's Aquarium in Atlanta and was about to get interviewed for his longtime dream job.
At this moment, an harassment campaign against him started in internet tagging him as animal abuser. A video showing supposedly the proofs was uploaded to internet, and spread like fire for all news, creating a lot of buzz, and surfing in the same wave of outrage that blackfish created.
They video supposedly shows a young Jose Luis kicking and shouting dolphins in a trainer session. Calling it nasty things like "tonto" (dumb) and "vago" (lazy) that could lead to severe depression to any spanish speaker dolphin.
Of course with blackfish spreading rage and justice fire, something like a "swim with dolphins" program was unacceptable and frowned upon by the public: Dolphins could kill people. It seems that the same public don't see any problem with the concept of therapy dogs or horses, even if dogs and horses kill each year thousands of people (and dolphins kill zero). But dolphins are magical mystic non-human humans that came from outer space and appear in all psychodelic posters, and dogs are... just dogs, I suppose.
The association SOS delfines sued Barbero by animal abuse and for violating the law in the therapy dolphins program, and he and his family received the usual package of sadistic death menaces on internet.
The Atlanta's aquarium received a lot of mails threatening with a boycott campaign if they dare to hire him. Afraid of the consequences, they removed the hiring offer, and the rest is known.
Personally I think that the video was clearly fake. Audio and video don't match clearly. The supposed 'kick' to dolphins does not look at all like a kick, and the silhouettes in the video could belong to anybody. As proof of anything would be seen as a highly suspiciously doctored one... but it does not change a bit the fact that it caused real and massive damage in the life of this man without any real possibility of defense.
And if it were real, wow, somebody really hated this man!. Such old video was reserved for decades to be released with surgical precision at the exact time that could do more harm to him?. If the goal was stopping animal abuse, why they waited for decades instead to denounce it ASAP?. This seems a pretty miserable act to me.
Nobody was sued for deliberately destroying the professional reputation of a man, harassing his family and driving him to commit suicide in a parking's airport.
After the "ca-ching" opportunity dissapeared, SOS delfines go 'shalalala' in silent mode. Everybody enjoys a good twitter witch hunt before dinner (It makes you feel morally better than the other guys). The bad man died, hurrah! Isn't marvellous animalism?
[…]
But many conservationists suspect some fishermen retaliate violently”
I think it’s at least equally likely they learned that boats of a certain size in the neighborhood of tuna can attack their family, and do this to protect it.
Those things haven't appeared in the press. As a result I'd guess that something more specific about these boats, or maybe this place, that has them attacking.
What about swimming with them?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTIcQMwYC1o
These are highly intelligent animals with complex behavior and in general, they are pretty friendly to humans. I suspect that the pod in the article has some powerful reason for attacking boats.
orcas aren't one species
The orcas that eat mammals have more varied diets and thus hunting techniques, since their food source requires that (mammals are smart, have good eyesight and hearing, etc.).
Local coast guards might keep track of this sort of information. But there's nothing about that one way or the other in the article.
Without some quantitative handle, it's impossible to even know whether something unusual is happening here.
Do you need a number? A chart?
It's right there on the page. We're up to from "several" from "never". That's an astounding change in a rapid time.
TFA: In 1972 the Robertson family from Staffordshire were shipwrecked off the Galapagos Islands after an orca strike (their book, Survive the Savage Sea became a classic).
The southern residents of the Pacific Northwest are the most studied population of wild of orcas in the world (actually, they're probably the most studied population of wild mammals). They seem to have a lot of similarities to the Gibraltar orcas- both seem to eat fish exclusively, and in fact heavily specialize in one large fish species (Chinook salmon for the southern residents, bluefin tuna for the Gibraltar orcas). Both populations appear heavily stressed due to human activity, especially food loss due to fishing, and both have experienced a crash in successful pregnancies. In the southern residents, two years ago this led to Talequah making news by carrying her dead calf for two weeks over hundreds of miles, seemingly in mourning. I think these attacks are also basically emotional and based on a correct general understanding of how boats are affecting them, and not especially different from what humans would do in a similar situation.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/08/humpback-wha...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/male-orca-and-its-...
A young male orca and its mother kills a orca baby by drowning it during four hours, with the baby orca's mother nearby.
The researchers are guessing they did it so that the other mother orca that had just had its baby killed could be impregnated by the young male orca, thereby making sure that its genetics would be spread.
What aspect is over-humanized?
My first reaction was, "Wow, fish must hate us."
That exceptionalism only really applies to in-person encounters. If it's out of sight, out of mind, then we're as indifferent as any other.
It's only in places where you have the luxury. Humans still eat veal. Male baby chick are still being shredded alive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
The meat industry hasn't been completely taken over by robots yet. Humans are still doing the killing, especially with calves. Tribes that heavily rely on hunt won't hesitate much either.
Regarding playing with our prey, we elevated it to sport and culture (Fox hunting for example). Not even for sustenance, just entertainment.
Since this is a thread about Orcas, Orcas are extremely friendly to humans and there are no reported human deaths from wild orcas. There's countless videos you can observe yourself of them playing with kayakers, boats, or even kids scratching the orca's tongue. Hardly would consider that "very ruthless."
Imagine aliens who didn't understand human politics trying to tell the difference between fireworks and anti-aircraft fire.
Food is certainly a problem, and the one that gets the most attention. But there are significant issues in noise pollution as well. For example, if you listen to recordings of sounds in the Puget Sound / Salish Sea, you'll be stunned at just how loud boat traffic noise can be (https://vimeo.com/247051394). I imagine this is just plainly torturous to animals, particularly social ones that communicate through vocalizations. There's also the risk of sonar testing (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/orca-endangered-killer-whale-ri...). You can learn more about this in the documentary "Sonic Sea" (https://www.sonicsea.org/).
Other issues include reduced oxygen levels in the Puget Sound (https://ecology.wa.gov/Water-Shorelines/Puget-Sound/Helping-...), stormwater runoff pollution from dense sources like Seattle (https://komonews.com/news/local/new-project-to-tackle-puget-...), opioids and other pollutants from sewage (https://kuow.org/stories/relaxed-mussels-opioids-found-puget...), etc. The number of issues impacting our marine ecosystem is staggering and poorly understood.
On the bright side, I want to add that Tahlequah/J35 just recently gave birth to a new calf, J57. Fingers crossed for a healthy pod! News article at https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/08/tahleq... and photos at https://www.whaleresearch.com/j57
If there is an attractive rather than repellent sound that would work (a calf in distress?) maybe it could lure the grampus away with a little remote control boat.
But their intelligence might make whatever does work only temporarily effective.
The animal clearly saw the man drop the item, but also seemed to be aware of the man's inability to fetch it, and that perhaps it was a 'possession' of some kind.
It seems ver reasonable to me that mammals have emotions, memories, and rational emotional response. If they were 'hurt' by a boat it seems super rational to me that they would be angered by or dislike boats. I suspect they are aware 'boats do fishing' and can directly correlate their hunger to the boats.
I don't know why this isn't the first response, and is considered 'unscientific' in the article.
I'm taking out in the middle of the ocean. I could definitely sense this from the animal.
So I definitely think they have emotions and much more intelligence than people give them credit for.
https://youtu.be/pgPfkqQcIZs
They do seem to know what they're doing by going after rudders and keels. And they seem to take off when they have accomplished their objective.
The way you need to understand it is that most natural systems implement homeostasis on multiple scales, and information transferred between organisms has a somewhat communicable nature because organisms evolved and competed within a shared environment -- e.g human beings proteins are responses to environmental conditions.
I certainly wouldn't want to imply in the slightest that huuu-mons are narcissistic or focused only on themselves (like "ouch the kick from the shotgun hurt my thumb" is how we might summarize a shot that ruined the lives of an entire pheasant family), but would we be sad to find out that things like "attacking us" and "scaring us", "and making us feel totally powerless by breaking our rudder," all of which figure prominently in the human experience of the encounter, don't even merit a mention in the orca newspaper article about it? Could it be that the orca newspaper article (just bear with me for chrissakes) simply says "Another Boat Found in Feeding Area" and goes on to describe how so-and-so and his crew followed procedure and first broke the rudder, which they've figured out seems to be a prerequisite for taking over steering, and then turned the intruder away?
Could it be that the PWM motor control on the autohelm is bothering them...it could resonate down the rudder and essentially make a speaker. Once the Orca destroy the sound they seem to be leaving.
Again...total shot in the dark. Just trying to spur some thought in other directions.
Having said that, I think the simplest explanation for targeting sailboats is simply that the orcas are less likely to be injured by the motor, and it doesn't blast deafening static when you get close to it.
I know people younger than me complain about the pwm sound from my stepper drivers on my printers...but I cannot hear it.
The exception might be an RPi driven DIY autopilot where you can carry spare actuators (and spare RPi's), but that still requires electricity so would be useless in an emergency where you lose power (thunder strike or water shorting the batteries).
All in all I find it weird why this is happening now all of a sudden . We've been overfishing for decades and it's not like there's been a large increase in maritime activity lately.
Mybe they just finally had enough and snapped.. Would hate to see the sea become a hostile environment for humans, but we also have it coming.
Homemade autopilots are unfortunately still quite rare, although the technology does exist. You basically need an RPi, a motor controller and a motor, with Pypilot as software.
https://pypilot.org
Also check out the OpenPlotter project mentioned there. I'm using it with a RPi with a 7" touchscreen.
> Reports of orcas striking sailing boats in the Straits of Gibraltar have left sailors and scientists confused. Just what is causing such unusually aggressive behaviour?
We don't know if orcas are "stressed" or if they're having fun, or if they patiently, rationally decided to wage a war against humans on boats.
Adding "stressed" in the title is a judgment call, and a condescending one.
It's not a stretch to say a population with catastrophically declining population is likely stressed.
Anyway, the title has been changed now. I don't mind but I don't think adding stressed was unfair, given the details of stress described in the article I have outlined above.
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/dolphins-gain-unprecedented-protection...
Why is this a default deny policy, with just a few exceptions for the tiny few species we feel hold the relative position of more valuable than other species? If orcas never existed, would they award their runner-up the get-out-of-kill-free card instead?
I think it should be the inverse, with extremely rigorous criteria and years of deliberation over which species to exclude, rather than which ones to include. Don't get me wrong, I prefer one over none, but it feels a little bit like Saudi Arabia finally permitting women to drive and then showering them with praise for their admirable feminist ethos.
I don't know when the day might come, but I think it's inevitable in the long run that this inverted approach will be what almost everyone does and almost everyone will be absolutely baffled and mortified that it used to be done any other way. I don't know whether or not any of us will live to see that day, but I'm prety confident it'll happen eventually.
It's causing aassive amount of shark deaths in Australia -
https://taronga.org.au/conservation-and-science/australian-s...
This is assuming it's this year this orca phenomenon is happening.
Not sure why.
I'd start by at looking at engine noise no longer scaring off these predators.
"But they are attacking _our boats_!! We need to do something!"
in believe how there is some evil animal out there, simply out to take away their fun. Then they arm themselves up with harpoons, because:
"Well, not going to shoot them, _unless_ they attack my boat!! It's only self-defense!"
Just like with people, who need to go where polar bears are and arm themselves with rifles, because they might "have no choice" when attacked by starving polar bear.
This is so short sighted. For those people, all that counts is their "fun" while on this planet. They pay for some service, that is available and don't feel any responsibility. Perhaps simply don't f* go there and have fun somewhere else?! But no, fun is more important than the life of endangered species, so these kind of tours are still offered. Money can be made. Money, you understand? Omg it's money!
It's disgusting and I believe, that no one has the right to shoot a polar bear, even in self-defense. Please simply die, get eaten, instead of killing one of those endangered beings. There are enough humans here, we don't need you and neither does this planet.
You first.
This is thrown in at the end. Why is the presence of 30-50 adult orca distributed over 5 pods in this particular part of the ocean of huge importance?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade
It may be that reading this article will provide the wherewithal to answer this question but perhaps there’s someone here who understands the particulars and can shed some light.