While I don't much care about the yachts and find the fact that the behaviour is spreading fascinating, my fear out of all this is people will start hurting the whales to try to get them to stop.
there is bound to be some kind of response if this remains a trend; and given that some of these boats are having their fin/bulb keels seemingly targeted by these animals means that the crews of the boats are in some greater level of mortal peril than is already provided by the hobby..
I feel bad for the animals, but sailing doesn't seem to be going anywhere as a global interest and boats produced are getting to be more and more fragile in the search for performance. I imagine that it's only a matter of time until there will be a violent reaction when a crew feels that they're in mortal danger -- all I can hope for is that it produces a recognition of danger that also sweeps through the Orca community as a trend and they start to avoid yachts for the sake of both parties.
When I watch the videos I just kind of think it's like watching a cat scratching themselves and rubbing up against anything with an edge on my desk. Wholly benign behavior that is a detriment simply due to their scale compared to us.
I totally agree. There's a part of me going 'hell yeah go orcas', and another part knowing that in a war, humans are gonna win, and I don't like what that means for orcas.
Or maybe the orcas will restrict their boat-ramming, people-eating behavior to refugee boats. The powers that be will be happy, just as long as they leave the billion-carrying submarines alone.
Yacht is a loaded term. A 30ft sailboat is a yacht. Given the crazy housing prices, a lot of people are buying sailboats and living in them because it is way cheaper than renting.
Yacht does not mean wealthy. I am firmly middle class. My family is planning to move onto a sailboat next year.
Between boat upkeep, day to day expenses and mooring fees it's actually cheaper than renting? That's interesting. I would have assumed it would be death by a thousand cuts and not worth the unreliable services and tiny living space.
Just add a low voltage electric fence to 2 plates glued underwater at port and starboard. Salt water conducts, also Orca's conduct - some small current flow that will be repellant to the Orca's, but not harmful.
They do this to repel carp swimming upriver. one of those, with proper voltage and current limiting should be felt by an orca, but not harm the orca. A little experimentation will find a safe repellant level.
Orcas are a lot smarter than carp and appear to be doing this deliberately. It doesn't seem immediately obvious that causing these animals pain will prevent them from causing damage.
Electric fish barriers generate really strong fields, using buildings' full of power electronics. They are surrounded by fences with prominent warning signs, and if you fall into the water I'm pretty sure you die.
So maybe something like this could be "switched on" temporarily -- run on batteries for a few minutes -- but you sure wouldn't want the boat to run with this on all the time. It probably wouldn't even be possible, energetically.
But yeah, electric eels do exist.
Maybe a big drum of capsaicin would be better.
Ideally you'd find a way to befriend them though. Some kind of carrot instead. Hm.
Small sailboats don’t have that much power available. 1000W solar, 6000 Wh batteries, and separate generator on medium size. Running AC is challenge away from shore for most boats.
You seem to be an order of magnitude away from what I consider normal for a small sailboat. 80W solar panel & 400Ah battery bank. Even the 'high output' alternator only puts out 70A max. Do people really need AC when away from shore? I lived in the Caribbean for years and never had it, its much cooler out on the water..
I follow cruisers and Youtube rich ones. Also, 6000Wh is 500Ah 12V batteries. AC is pretty rare on sailboats but does show up on nicer ones, but I get the impression nobody runs it except on shore power.
Also, when news say orcas are attacking small sailboats, I think they are comparing them to large yachts. And not actually small sailboats below 25'. I suspect most are 30-50' since that is most popular size for offshore.
I'd be willing to argue that "sentient" is a bad word. These creatures are capable of transmitting complicated ideas. That means they have wisdom. This means they are sapient, not sentient. Sentient means they are able to respond to input, but we don't go around and call HTTP servers sentient.
That's a distinction I hadn't paid attention to before. Yeah, it would seem orcas have both -- sentence and sapience. And the sapience is more interesting / less immediately obvious.
It's a bit surprising that something like this didn't start happening sooner. It's not as if one can expect to mosey through the territory of large intelligent land predators completely unassailed.
I thought territoriality was more a thing for "peer" sizes. Adult lions don't chase mice for invading territory. And while foxes may be highly territorial they aren't stupid enough to try to attack say a bear for invading.
This American Life just did a segment where the experts were very skeptical of both the theories presented in this article - that the first encounters near Spain were caused by a traumatic event of a matriarch, and also that orca pods would communicate with each other to spread the behavior.
The theory presented in that segment was the first orcas are sort of like rowdy teenagers participating in a fad, and the newer event near Scotland was something of a coincidence.
It’s a good segment regardless of what you think, and the first half of the episode was one of the better reports of ChatGPT I have heard, so also of interest to people here. The name of the episode is “Greetings, People of Earth.”
Orcas do go in for fads (look up 'orca salmon hats') but experts oftentimes dismiss things as coincidence because they don't have a theory and don't want to look stupid by speculating. When I was growing up reports of ball lightning were dismissed as hallucinations or optical illusions until video and spectrographic technology advanced sufficiently to capture the phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
I think what that sentence is saying is that we don't know how to reproduce it in a lab. We don't know what exactly is happening in the real world that is causing us to perceive this. It could be an illusion I guess, but I think it's undisputed it's a real phenomenon.
> There are videos of it, and lots of people have seen it, not sure how much more proof you need
That describes Bigfoot. I’d hope your epidemic standard is beyond anecdotes + videos that report to show what they report they’re showing. Else you can be made to believe anything.
I don’t know enough about ball lightning to care one way or another.
This is an even more dishonest comment because the answer to the question "can evidence of ball lightning be easily faked using video editing?" is quite obviously "yes".
Talk about a dishonest comment. You are literally replying to a thread in which a History Channel feature of a confirmed CGI video was used as evidence that "there are videos of" ball lightning.
The History channel is junk, sadly. They're perfectly willing to promote false things. Both of the two recordings shown are likely not ball lightning.
I personally agree that ball lightning probably exists. However, there is another interesting phenomenon where a brilliant blue/white "spark" of electricity can travel along a wire. I don't have a name for it but power companies are certainly familiar with it. I've seen footage of it happening repeatedly along the same stretch of wire after a storm as an automated system tried to restore power a few times before keeping the power shut off.
The theory is that it's regular lightning, and the rest is a retina-caused illusion? So people actually see ball lightning, but it would be almost impossible to get on a digital camera. So it does, in fact "exist", just not physically.
My father saw ball lightning. He described it as occurring near a small fence -- really a couple stakes and string with flags for visibility hanging off it. Said that the ball would hover as it jumped from post to post then fizzled out.
Ball lightning is one of those things that you'd expect to be easier to detect because of the increased use of cameras. Why isn't Youtube flooded with dozens of videos showing lightning balls? There are a few, but none of them are convincing. (One is clearly a drone being flown in a thunderstorm.) Most are fakumentaries. (3 seconds of shaky zoomed-in "proof" and 5 minutes of a so-called expert breathlessly talking about it.) How can ball lightning both have lots of people claiming to see it, but is infrequently caught on video?
My suspicion is people are encountering normal lightning discharges at close range and the "ball" is an illusion caused by how eyes work. If someone attempted to get ball lightning on camera they'd be disappointed to see the recording look nothing like how they remembered it.
I have seen ball lightning here in Alaska. One time, at night. Distance maybe 120 feet away. I watching a glowing orb perhaps 3 feet in diameter drift from the front of my parents garage towards their house before disappearing. An absolutely crystal clear view. I was on the phone with my wife at the time and describing the event to her, it was absolutely chilling to see ! I have never seen anything like it before or after. I should have ran down there and seen if I could sense any after effects, but quite frankly, I was terrified.
I had climbed a tree (at night) and looked down and there was a red glowing ball of light that drifted and bobbed along horizontally maybe 6 or 8 feet off the ground, and then disappeared. It was maybe a foot across or a little less. A friend was with me, we both watched in amazement.
I never knew what it was and halfway thought maybe I imagined it (except my friend saw it too). Until today I never knew what it might have been as this is my first time hearing of ball lighting. But it seems likely that is what it was.
After so many decades, glad to have a rational explanation at last! Thanks HN!
Are you sure it was ball lighting? Other possible explanations: ghost, aliens, portal to another dimension, glitch in the matrix, …, any of a long list of psychic abilities? [1]. Personally, I hope the chupacabra was involved in some shape or form.
Clearly orcas have culture that spreads. It’s a bit silly to speculate about patient zero being a matriarch as there’s zero evidence, likewise until a mechanism of communication is known saying it was or was not communicated between pods without evidence isn’t reasonable.
In this case I think it's interesting how people project their personal social views onto the blank slate. The idea that the trend must have started by a female whale that was somehow harmed and is now seeking Justice if it's cleanly into the framework with what some people view the world.
The idea that it was started by some way all that got a kick out of causing destruction doesn't have the same social resonance
> In this case I think it's interesting how people project their personal social views onto the blank slate. The idea that the trend must have started by a female whale that was somehow harmed and is now seeking Justice if it's cleanly into the framework with what some people view the world.
You are injecting a political spin where there is none. Orcas live in a matriarchical hierarchy. People assume that the orcas have started hunting because the "pack leader" was hurt. They might or might not be correct, but they're not doing what you're describing.
And I think they are doing what I'm describing. There's basically no scientific reason to favor Revenge story over entertainment except that it resonates with people and gets more clicks
The animal does not seen disoriented, just exploring the object. I seems play behavior
If I'm not wrong, the giant worm Crassicauda does not affect orcas, but can attack false killer whales and relatives, so is not an impossible hypothese
Exactly - they look like they are itching themselves on the point of the rudder. Maybe there is some infection near their blowhole that they are trying to scratch.
Take some bio samples from the rudders for analysis.
The brilliant American Life segment with a juxtaposition of the “Greetings, People of Earth” story with reporting on ChatGPT and the Orcas creates a bricolage that may spur thoughts around questions related to our ability to recognize non-human intelligence.
Orcas are cultural animals that are similar to us in that fads are a thing for them. A while back they had a fad where they'd kill a salmon and wear it as a hat. I think this is a fad, they're having fun, it'll pass.
Hopefully a nefarious actor doesn't start training the orcas to engage in criminal activity. It has happened before with penguins, please refer to the excellent documentary, Batman Returns.
Yes I know orcas and sperm whales are different, but its weird that this is suggested a new behavior in general. And not just a new counting of something that has been going on for centuries.
Orcas haven't been ramming boats for decades. Now, all of a sudden, we're seeing the behavior crop up all over the place. This is new behavior that is being communicated and taught.
Imagine when they discover that there are calorie sources aboard the ships. Orcas are known to eat terrestrial mammals such as swimming deer and moose. They've been observed hunting swimming dogs.
If they wanted to eat humans they had plenty of chances. Incidents where an orca attacked a human are rare, with the notable exception of orcas in captivity.
Orcas are dolphins. Humans are in pretty friendly terms with them. Here's an incident where a bunch of swimmers came in close proximity to orcas. They seem quite friendly.
The ones in captivity did it because they're basically an imprisoned intelligent creature, traumatized and borderline psychotic living in such confined spaces.
A single whaler in 1820 versus a spate of events since a few months back seem rather unrelated, orcas have not been ramming boats all over for the last two centuries.
Though I guess it’s possible that they’re also avenging or preemptively defending themselves.
It was a single well-documented event with survivors to tell the story.
And the story of the survivors itself is a harrowing tale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)
It's entirely possible there were other incidents and the loss of ship and crew was just written off to "lost at sea".
This comment is strange. Sperm whale from Moby dick's era routinely flight back when harpooned.
Today's killer whale behavior is clearly new, and nearly the only violent behavior seen in any whale in a hundred years. .. and with multiple recent reports, it is a new trend.
I'm skeptical it is new. An orca ran into a boat causing no injuries or real damage. If this had happened 10 years ago would it have been reported in any way - either on the news or by a database?
I think an easier explanation is someone started tracking this and now boat owners know to report it, because they have heard that someone is tracking it.
I believe it is only running since 2020. I realize the argument you are making is that it was created/publicized AFTER a couple orca attacks. I'm suggesting that if this online portal had existed for anytime in history you would have gotten reports consistently. I would wager this is mostly, if not all, an observation bias.
It got in the news in 2020 when it happened near Gibraltar; since then it has been reported in the news many times, 250 attacks near Gibraltar have been reported.
And now last week one near Scotland, and this one this week.
Surely if it happened all the time, and it was in the news for so long, it would have been noticed and reported from all over the world?
But the 2020 incident could have just captured the media attention arbitrarily because of good timing. If there had been a similar attack in 1980 would it have captured the media attention so much without the internet? Probably not.
I dont know every incident but this one in Scotland involved an orca ramming into a boat and causing zero injuries and no actual damage to the boat. How would this even have been reported before the internet? A tv anchor decides to dedicate a minute of their broadcast to describing a boat that collided with an orca?
there are plenty of anecdotal reports dating back almost 100 years. there are reports here before 2020 of ships being destroyed.
yes I realize the hugeness of the numbers now is much larger than it was before 2020 - but again that is when the database was established which allowed anyone to submit a report, no matter the extent of the damage
Might as well be both, the Gibraltar pod going through a real fad and the combination of social media and attention caused be Gibraltar news giving baseline level occurrences elsewhere visibility like never before
its very possible. though im also skeptical than sailors in indonesia would think to log onto that website to report such an incidence. so still seems highly possible to me that it was super big news among sailors in the Iberian peninsula and now, only near there, are you getting consistent reports because those people know to report
Despite all the evidence we have of history repeating itself, people constantly want to convince themselves that they are somehow separate from the past and “this time is different”.
Maximum depth of penetration is the ratio of the densities of the projectile and the matter to be penetrated times the length of the projectile. Harpoons have a higher density than water and are quite long, so they work.
> There's only 50k orcas in the world, they're more valuable than us.
Species diversity is unquestionably important. This small population of intelligent aquatic mammals is unique and beautiful and valuable. The eons of evolutionary hill climbing that led to them cannot be reproduced. They're a distillation of all that has happened to their lineage up to this point, and that's beautiful.
That said, the only apparent species capable of getting us off this rock and avoiding the total annihilation of all life are humans. If we die off and another intelligence emerges later on, all of the easily accessible energy for industrialization and getting us out of the gravity well may be gone. This is our one, best shot.
When our sun dies, none of this will have mattered at all. If we're still stuck on this earth, we may as well have never even existed. A brief brilliant flash that led to nothing and was forgotten.
The existential counter to that is if we can make it beyond our solar system. Maybe we evolve beyond our current biological forms, maybe computers become our custodians, who knows. Maybe some future super intellect revives all of the state leading up to it, and maybe we'll become (or already are) holographic simulations of what once was: memories of our world.
With respect to the geologic timescale and the fate of earth intelligence and biology, humans matter way more than orcas. That isn't to say we shouldn't go to great lengths to preserve orcas. But there's a much bigger story at play, and we shouldn't discount our place in it.
They've not yet shown any sign of being a danger to the hull as far as I know. They pretty often break the rudder off leaving the boat difficult to control. Most long distance sailors would carry some kind of emergency rudder arrangement but more casual coastal types don't usually.
Speculation among sailors is that "hey, did you know you can break bits off those things?" is as plausible an explanation as any.
There are known ways to scare orcas off but it's illegal to distress them and nobody really wants to. I certainly don't.
We have caused the Halocene extinction. Our wasteful lifestyles are the virus of the planet. The overconsumed. The technologists who think our devices and social media and VR are a substitute to blind us from the truth. We are destroying our planet. That’s reality. Our devices and travel are our escape.
“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.“
It’s humbling to see nature trying somehow to fight back against us. Their goal. For us to chill more and be more content. What if mankind just lives in peace and balance with nature? No plastic. Carbon balance. Nothing added annually that wouldn’t be taken back and fixed anew by nature. Greenhouse gases back at 350 ppm. What if?
The orcas are attacking small sailboats, which tend to have less of an environmental impact… less engine use, quiet, fewer people on board, very small scale fishing (if at all). It’s weird to be rooting against this sort of ship when cruise ships and trawlers are the real problem - and also pretty difficult to attack. Will you count it as a success if people favor larger powerboats over small sailboats?
I’m not explaining any ideology… definitely don’t think of Orcas in terms of “woke” or not. Just stating that rooting for the orcas is rooting for something fairly self-defeating.
But never forget that Orcas aren't called Killer Whales because they're "Whales That Kill", but because they're "Killers Of Whales".
Orcas kill other whales, sometimes for fun not for food. And they have such a reputation in the cetacean kingdom as brutal murderous assholes, that whales will help seals escape from them, to their own detriment/risk.
So yeah. In Humans vs. Orcas, it's hard not to root for the orcas, especially considering how we've treated them in captivity for the last 100 years. But on a more broader mammalian scale, we're both kind of the intelligent assholes of the animal kingdom.
I've never believed that orcas have always left humans alone. I think they began leaving humans alone when commercial whaling took off and they witnessed first hand how dangerous humans can be to whales. Maybe that generational memory is now fading.
Yeah I know the argument that humans are too bony and taste bad, but how would they know we taste bad if they never even take a nibble to taste test us? These are very intelligent mammals, they should be curious about how we taste. Am I to believe that sharks are more inquisitive and willing to experiment with food than orcas?
Sharks are much dumber than orcas but that's not saying much. They do take experimental nibbles on people, and occasionally follow through and actually eat people.
There's no doubt they teach behaviors to each other, but that goes hand-in-hand with invention and experimentation. Different pods have different diets and hunting tactics, meaning at least some of them occasionally try something new and teach the others if it works well.
It may be retribution. Maybe a yacht propeller maimed or killed an important orca, an elder or a child, and now they want retribution. Or maybe it's just a fun thing to do, or a teenager right of passage thing. Or some combination. It's fun to speculate!
This is not the first time orcas have shown an awareness of us in boats: through the second half of the 1800s orcas in Australia actually helped whalers hunt baleen whales: herding the prey, and even grabbing ropes in their mouths to help haul, in exchange for the most valuable (to them) parts of the carcasses.
Old Tom, one of the most helpful orcas, died in 1930. His skeleton is on display at a museum, and the wear marks from the ropes are visible on his teeth.
Died in 1930 when a whaler tried to bring the carcass in early, before Tom had his share (there was a storm approaching). Tom lost teeth grabbing the tow rope and washed up deceased with oral abscesses some time later.
This was after most of the pod of killer whales had disappeared - thought maybe hunted down in Norway. Whaling is fascinating history. But it is very sad.
Are you sure? I don't know much about orcas but that's a very long way to track the same whales. The Wikipedia article [1] states Norwegian whalers a little further north in Jervis Bay, still in Australian waters.
I fully agree, whaling is a very sad history. As a kid, I occasionally saw "whale pots", big iron cauldrons used for boiling down blubber (I suppose.) I thought they were really cool. I don't think so any more.
Aha, I misread “Norwegian” to be in Norway, not Norwegians whaling in Australia. Certainly makes a lot more sense geographically, I was thinking that seemed like a long way to swim.
Porphyrios harassed ships in the waters of Constantinople for over fifty
years,[7] though not continuously since it at times disappeared for lengthy
periods of time.[4] It most frequently appeared in the Bosporus Strait.[1]
Porphyrios made no distinctions in regard to which ships it attacked,
recorded as having attacked fishing vessels, merchant ships and warships.[1]
Many ships were sunk by Porphyrios, and its mere reputation terrified the
crews of many more; ships often took detours to go around the waters where
the whale most commonly swam.[4] Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565), perplexed
by the whale attacks and wishing to keep sea routes safe,[11] made it a
matter of great concern to capture Porphyrios, though he was unable to devise
a means through which to do this.[1][4][12]
They assumed it was a whale but from the region it's likely it was an orca instead especially because currently the orca attacks started (again) from the mediterranean
Anyone who has one of those has a disproportionate amount of wealth obtained almost certainly at the expense of others.
The reality is that anyone earning over 70k a year is earning more than thier fair share of society's production.
We only produce a fixed amount of GDP, which when divided by population makes for a fairly small number even excluding children.
Yachts are hella expensive, with even the cheapest used sail boats costing more than a new car and an "ok" used one being 200k+
That not middle class shit, that's rich people shit. People earning 65 k a year and raising 2 kids can Never afford that, unless they are neglectful, go bankrupt to do it etc.
People need to stop using Elon level wealth as the metric for rich.... That's not rich, that's Obscene. Rich is anyone earning over 100k a year. That's Extreme privilege having nearly 2 shares of GDP while how many have to have less than a fair share to get you there? Yea....
I'm kind of with you on the yacht thing especially with the pricier ones (not sure you've looked hard enough for bargains, tired-looking but seaworthy 22-26 footers can be had for less than 10 grand, or so ive been told by someone who lives on one) but you lost me at the 70k number.
Not because it's too high or too low but because it's just so arbitrary. 70k in Glasgow is a very comfortable income, 70k in Tacoma Washington is just about enough to get by. In San Francisco there are indigents living (primarily) on the street whose income and benefits technically sum higher than 70k. And if any not-yet-indigent tried to move to San Francisco on that income they would soon join them.
I've always felt a scaling factor proportional to the extremes of individual difference makes the most sense here. Ideally the highest earning income possible in an economy should be somewhat proportional to the scale of capability in any given individual within it. I could acknowledge that people exist who might be five, possibly even 10 times as productive as I am when all of their merits are considered.
But there's no way in hell someone is 100 times, or 1,000 times or 10,000 times more productive or valuable and contributor to the world as me (or anyone), at least on the scale of individual capability. Without , that is, the benefit of some amplification apparatus that they happen to have at their disposal.
But it's pretty hopeless to get upset about these things. As a species we've hit some sort of ceiling long ago on efficiently allocating resources and rewards to ability. For example we'd much rather pay 30 bucks a week to give ourselves permission to dream about becoming millionaires, and as a reward watch yet another schlub (who like all that have come before him will do nothing of any consequence with the windfall) collect a two billion dollar paycheck - of our money - instead.
Implicit in my statement is that I'm speaking to averages but there is the simple fact that the only reason costs are higher is because markets raise prices to the result of supply and demand not because of some force outside our control
It's only because the average incomes are higher that costs are higher. Drop those wages to a normalized value and suddenly the market corrects as it reaches price equilibrium through bilateral supply and demand.
Humans are jerks. Sonar makes orcas bleed from their ears.
Orcas are also used as circus animals (i.e.: SeaWorld), and some of them get so aggravated that they commit suicide by bumping their heads against the pool walls.
Orcas should attack more often, I fully approve of it.
In fact, we should help orcas multiply in numbers so that the yacht enthusiasts get displaced and leave the sea to the creatures doing a free service for the environment.
Looks like the orcas in Scotland are taking their nautical skills to the next level! Seems like they've got some new ideas on how to navigate the high seas. Watch out, sailors!
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadI feel bad for the animals, but sailing doesn't seem to be going anywhere as a global interest and boats produced are getting to be more and more fragile in the search for performance. I imagine that it's only a matter of time until there will be a violent reaction when a crew feels that they're in mortal danger -- all I can hope for is that it produces a recognition of danger that also sweeps through the Orca community as a trend and they start to avoid yachts for the sake of both parties.
When I watch the videos I just kind of think it's like watching a cat scratching themselves and rubbing up against anything with an edge on my desk. Wholly benign behavior that is a detriment simply due to their scale compared to us.
Yacht does not mean wealthy. I am firmly middle class. My family is planning to move onto a sailboat next year.
I doubt you'd save any money living on a boat in LA or Miami.
The cheapest thing is living on anchor.
If you outfit the boat with solar, some lithium, and a water maker, your real expenses are boat maintenance which is cheap when doing it yourself.
I know digital nomads who’s total expenses for a year are 30k for a family of four. That includes all boat costs and living expenses.
Muay Thai practitioners roll their shins and smack them against trees, causing pain.
Anxiety often induced animals to cause pain to themselves in the form of self-harm.
And so on and so forth.
So maybe something like this could be "switched on" temporarily -- run on batteries for a few minutes -- but you sure wouldn't want the boat to run with this on all the time. It probably wouldn't even be possible, energetically.
But yeah, electric eels do exist.
Maybe a big drum of capsaicin would be better.
Ideally you'd find a way to befriend them though. Some kind of carrot instead. Hm.
Also, when news say orcas are attacking small sailboats, I think they are comparing them to large yachts. And not actually small sailboats below 25'. I suspect most are 30-50' since that is most popular size for offshore.
Don’t do this on your boat. It will eat your propeller and every other metal object you’ve got underwater.
In dock it will be off
The theory presented in that segment was the first orcas are sort of like rowdy teenagers participating in a fad, and the newer event near Scotland was something of a coincidence.
It’s a good segment regardless of what you think, and the first half of the episode was one of the better reports of ChatGPT I have heard, so also of interest to people here. The name of the episode is “Greetings, People of Earth.”
That sounds more amazing to me than the theory of the traumatic event, an Ocra equivalent to a TikTok trend.
Orcas do go in for fads (look up 'orca salmon hats') but experts oftentimes dismiss things as coincidence because they don't have a theory and don't want to look stupid by speculating. When I was growing up reports of ball lightning were dismissed as hallucinations or optical illusions until video and spectrographic technology advanced sufficiently to capture the phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
> An optical spectrum of what appears to have been a ball lightning event was published in January 2014 and included a video at high frame rate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bBNeyrMOJE
I think what that sentence is saying is that we don't know how to reproduce it in a lab. We don't know what exactly is happening in the real world that is causing us to perceive this. It could be an illusion I guess, but I think it's undisputed it's a real phenomenon.
That describes Bigfoot. I’d hope your epidemic standard is beyond anecdotes + videos that report to show what they report they’re showing. Else you can be made to believe anything.
I don’t know enough about ball lightning to care one way or another.
No one has dressed up and walked in front of a camera as ball lightning
I personally agree that ball lightning probably exists. However, there is another interesting phenomenon where a brilliant blue/white "spark" of electricity can travel along a wire. I don't have a name for it but power companies are certainly familiar with it. I've seen footage of it happening repeatedly along the same stretch of wire after a storm as an automated system tried to restore power a few times before keeping the power shut off.
It’s possible it was a mass delusion or a ghost but both of those strike me as less likely.
Ball lightning is one of those things that you'd expect to be easier to detect because of the increased use of cameras. Why isn't Youtube flooded with dozens of videos showing lightning balls? There are a few, but none of them are convincing. (One is clearly a drone being flown in a thunderstorm.) Most are fakumentaries. (3 seconds of shaky zoomed-in "proof" and 5 minutes of a so-called expert breathlessly talking about it.) How can ball lightning both have lots of people claiming to see it, but is infrequently caught on video?
My suspicion is people are encountering normal lightning discharges at close range and the "ball" is an illusion caused by how eyes work. If someone attempted to get ball lightning on camera they'd be disappointed to see the recording look nothing like how they remembered it.
I had climbed a tree (at night) and looked down and there was a red glowing ball of light that drifted and bobbed along horizontally maybe 6 or 8 feet off the ground, and then disappeared. It was maybe a foot across or a little less. A friend was with me, we both watched in amazement.
I never knew what it was and halfway thought maybe I imagined it (except my friend saw it too). Until today I never knew what it might have been as this is my first time hearing of ball lighting. But it seems likely that is what it was.
After so many decades, glad to have a rational explanation at last! Thanks HN!
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_psychic_abilities
Link for context https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2022/02/14/66693872/and-now...
The idea that it was started by some way all that got a kick out of causing destruction doesn't have the same social resonance
You are injecting a political spin where there is none. Orcas live in a matriarchical hierarchy. People assume that the orcas have started hunting because the "pack leader" was hurt. They might or might not be correct, but they're not doing what you're describing.
Edit: ok Ira was sick and it's mentioned halfway through
If I'm not wrong, the giant worm Crassicauda does not affect orcas, but can attack false killer whales and relatives, so is not an impossible hypothese
Orcas are cultural animals that are similar to us in that fads are a thing for them. A while back they had a fad where they'd kill a salmon and wear it as a hat. I think this is a fad, they're having fun, it'll pass.
These headlines are so fun!
You might even say they’re orcastrating these attacks. It’s delphinidaely something worth paying attention to.
It was the 80s, dude. Big hair was radical!
https://www.gearrice.com/update/in-the-80s-an-orca-made-it-f...
The inspiration for Moby Dick, one of the most read books in English, was based on a ship sunk my sperm whales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)
Yes I know orcas and sperm whales are different, but its weird that this is suggested a new behavior in general. And not just a new counting of something that has been going on for centuries.
Imagine when they discover that there are calorie sources aboard the ships. Orcas are known to eat terrestrial mammals such as swimming deer and moose. They've been observed hunting swimming dogs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orca_attacks
Have they, though? Captive orcas aren't opportunistically hunting with their pod, and they're constantly kept fed. Their behaviors are reinforced.
Apart from captivity, human swimmers seldom interact in the wild.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Orcas eat land mammals, and we have plenty of evidence for that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ3mDXF3bcE
Though I guess it’s possible that they’re also avenging or preemptively defending themselves.
Only if you assume that the inspirational event in 1820 was the only time it happened.
I don't think the Georgians had the ability or inclination to document every time a whale took down a ship around the whole planet.
Today's killer whale behavior is clearly new, and nearly the only violent behavior seen in any whale in a hundred years. .. and with multiple recent reports, it is a new trend.
I think an easier explanation is someone started tracking this and now boat owners know to report it, because they have heard that someone is tracking it.
There is now an Orca Reporting form: https://www.theca.org.uk/orcas/interaction-report-form
I believe it is only running since 2020. I realize the argument you are making is that it was created/publicized AFTER a couple orca attacks. I'm suggesting that if this online portal had existed for anytime in history you would have gotten reports consistently. I would wager this is mostly, if not all, an observation bias.
And now last week one near Scotland, and this one this week.
Surely if it happened all the time, and it was in the news for so long, it would have been noticed and reported from all over the world?
I dont know every incident but this one in Scotland involved an orca ramming into a boat and causing zero injuries and no actual damage to the boat. How would this even have been reported before the internet? A tv anchor decides to dedicate a minute of their broadcast to describing a boat that collided with an orca?
And if it were normal behaviour, we'd see it reported from everywhere.
Also they damaged a bunch of ships near Gibraltar, and sank three. That would have been reported before 2020.
there are plenty of anecdotal reports dating back almost 100 years. there are reports here before 2020 of ships being destroyed.
yes I realize the hugeness of the numbers now is much larger than it was before 2020 - but again that is when the database was established which allowed anyone to submit a report, no matter the extent of the damage
At least one pod has learned to hunt and kill great whites, which may not be new to orcas but was news to us.
it's like trying to solve school shooting, by giving teachers guns
Species diversity is unquestionably important. This small population of intelligent aquatic mammals is unique and beautiful and valuable. The eons of evolutionary hill climbing that led to them cannot be reproduced. They're a distillation of all that has happened to their lineage up to this point, and that's beautiful.
That said, the only apparent species capable of getting us off this rock and avoiding the total annihilation of all life are humans. If we die off and another intelligence emerges later on, all of the easily accessible energy for industrialization and getting us out of the gravity well may be gone. This is our one, best shot.
When our sun dies, none of this will have mattered at all. If we're still stuck on this earth, we may as well have never even existed. A brief brilliant flash that led to nothing and was forgotten.
The existential counter to that is if we can make it beyond our solar system. Maybe we evolve beyond our current biological forms, maybe computers become our custodians, who knows. Maybe some future super intellect revives all of the state leading up to it, and maybe we'll become (or already are) holographic simulations of what once was: memories of our world.
With respect to the geologic timescale and the fate of earth intelligence and biology, humans matter way more than orcas. That isn't to say we shouldn't go to great lengths to preserve orcas. But there's a much bigger story at play, and we shouldn't discount our place in it.
Also it seems the orcas are bored.
If Hvaldimir is anything to go by a ball would be a good solution here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hvaldimir
Speculation among sailors is that "hey, did you know you can break bits off those things?" is as plausible an explanation as any.
There are known ways to scare orcas off but it's illegal to distress them and nobody really wants to. I certainly don't.
“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.“
It’s humbling to see nature trying somehow to fight back against us. Their goal. For us to chill more and be more content. What if mankind just lives in peace and balance with nature? No plastic. Carbon balance. Nothing added annually that wouldn’t be taken back and fixed anew by nature. Greenhouse gases back at 350 ppm. What if?
As the great George Carlin said: the planet isn’t going anywhere, we are!
The earth returns to land and sea
Our buildings burned and highways gone
I love my friends and everyone
But we've had our chance let's move aside
Let time wash us out with the tide
So it is both a dolphin and a whale.
Ah, unidan. Back when Reddit drama was low stakes.
Why should the richest humans sail on personal gilded craft?!
Down with yachts! The hour of revolution is at hand!
But never forget that Orcas aren't called Killer Whales because they're "Whales That Kill", but because they're "Killers Of Whales".
Orcas kill other whales, sometimes for fun not for food. And they have such a reputation in the cetacean kingdom as brutal murderous assholes, that whales will help seals escape from them, to their own detriment/risk.
So yeah. In Humans vs. Orcas, it's hard not to root for the orcas, especially considering how we've treated them in captivity for the last 100 years. But on a more broader mammalian scale, we're both kind of the intelligent assholes of the animal kingdom.
Yeah I know the argument that humans are too bony and taste bad, but how would they know we taste bad if they never even take a nibble to taste test us? These are very intelligent mammals, they should be curious about how we taste. Am I to believe that sharks are more inquisitive and willing to experiment with food than orcas?
Maybe they're intelligent enough to recognize our intelligence, and don't want to attack other intelligent beings?
I’m not sure that ethics and intelligence correlate nearly as well as we would like to think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...
Old Tom, one of the most helpful orcas, died in 1930. His skeleton is on display at a museum, and the wear marks from the ropes are visible on his teeth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tom_(orca)
This was after most of the pod of killer whales had disappeared - thought maybe hunted down in Norway. Whaling is fascinating history. But it is very sad.
Are you sure? I don't know much about orcas but that's a very long way to track the same whales. The Wikipedia article [1] states Norwegian whalers a little further north in Jervis Bay, still in Australian waters.
I fully agree, whaling is a very sad history. As a kid, I occasionally saw "whale pots", big iron cauldrons used for boiling down blubber (I suppose.) I thought they were really cool. I don't think so any more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tom_(orca)#Death_and_the_e...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyrios_(whale)
A sinking yacht it a serious threat to life but, hey, it's pretty neat, right?
The reality is that anyone earning over 70k a year is earning more than thier fair share of society's production.
We only produce a fixed amount of GDP, which when divided by population makes for a fairly small number even excluding children.
Yachts are hella expensive, with even the cheapest used sail boats costing more than a new car and an "ok" used one being 200k+
That not middle class shit, that's rich people shit. People earning 65 k a year and raising 2 kids can Never afford that, unless they are neglectful, go bankrupt to do it etc.
People need to stop using Elon level wealth as the metric for rich.... That's not rich, that's Obscene. Rich is anyone earning over 100k a year. That's Extreme privilege having nearly 2 shares of GDP while how many have to have less than a fair share to get you there? Yea....
Not because it's too high or too low but because it's just so arbitrary. 70k in Glasgow is a very comfortable income, 70k in Tacoma Washington is just about enough to get by. In San Francisco there are indigents living (primarily) on the street whose income and benefits technically sum higher than 70k. And if any not-yet-indigent tried to move to San Francisco on that income they would soon join them.
I've always felt a scaling factor proportional to the extremes of individual difference makes the most sense here. Ideally the highest earning income possible in an economy should be somewhat proportional to the scale of capability in any given individual within it. I could acknowledge that people exist who might be five, possibly even 10 times as productive as I am when all of their merits are considered.
But there's no way in hell someone is 100 times, or 1,000 times or 10,000 times more productive or valuable and contributor to the world as me (or anyone), at least on the scale of individual capability. Without , that is, the benefit of some amplification apparatus that they happen to have at their disposal.
But it's pretty hopeless to get upset about these things. As a species we've hit some sort of ceiling long ago on efficiently allocating resources and rewards to ability. For example we'd much rather pay 30 bucks a week to give ourselves permission to dream about becoming millionaires, and as a reward watch yet another schlub (who like all that have come before him will do nothing of any consequence with the windfall) collect a two billion dollar paycheck - of our money - instead.
It's only because the average incomes are higher that costs are higher. Drop those wages to a normalized value and suddenly the market corrects as it reaches price equilibrium through bilateral supply and demand.
Figured I'd add this because you, as with so many, are confused as to what constitutes middle class.
You have to earn over $100000 to be middle class as clearly shown in the illustration, and you're still in that group at $1mm a year.
Under $100k down to $10k is classed as poor, with those below $10k classed as miserable and making up the Vast majority of humanity.
This isn't my definition, this is the agreed upon standards.
Humans are jerks. Sonar makes orcas bleed from their ears.
Orcas are also used as circus animals (i.e.: SeaWorld), and some of them get so aggravated that they commit suicide by bumping their heads against the pool walls.
Orcas should attack more often, I fully approve of it.
In fact, we should help orcas multiply in numbers so that the yacht enthusiasts get displaced and leave the sea to the creatures doing a free service for the environment.
'Scary moment' as orcas disrupt ocean boat race - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452464 - June 2023 (89 comments)
Orcas sink 3 boats in Europe and appear to teach others to do the same. But why? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36006861 - May 2023 (21 comments)
Orcas are breaking rudders off boats in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32593799 - Aug 2022 (239 comments)
Killer whales are 'attacking' sailboats near Europe's coast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32540473 - Aug 2022 (9 comments)
Orcas striking sailing boats in the Straits of Gibraltar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24460126 - Sept 2020 (154 comments)