Humpbacks are amazing animals. I live in southeast Alaska, and humpbacks pass through here every spring and fall. They spend their winters in Hawaii where they mate, and they come back here to feed in the spring and summer.
When they first arrive in the spring you can see their vertebrae as they arch their back for a dive. After eating all summer, you can see how much they've filled out by the time they pass through on their way south in the fall. When they arch for a dive they've fattened up enough that you can't see individual vertebrae anymore.
It's an amazing experience to paddle a kayak out into a calm bay and sit for an hour surrounded by a dozen humpbacks, or to sit in a calm stretch of ocean with whales surfacing as far as you can see in every direction. They'll come within ten feet of a kayak, and you know they'll never bother you. They just seem curious about what's out in the water with them.
They engage in bubble-net feeding. A group of humpbacks circle underwater beneath a school of herring. They let out bubbles and build a wall of bubbles around the herring. The whales then swim up inside the bubbles and break the surface with their mouths open, feasting on the trapped herring. It's wild to see a ring of bubbles appear near you on the surface, and then see half a dozen whales rise up out of the water with their mouths open.
My favorite part of being close to whales is listening to them breathe. You can hear the size of their lungs from the sound of their breaths.
If you've never been close to whales, try to get on a whale watching tour. They're just incredible to see in person.
I just went to Alaska. It was my first time and I couldn't believe the amazing beauty I've seen. I would love to go back. You mentioned kayaking, any suggestions on where to go?
I live in Sitka, and it's a pretty cool place for kayaking. We face the open Pacific, but there are a bunch of small islands just offshore that protect most of our immediate coastline. So the water right next to town is relatively calm. Then there's a larger volcanic island about 7 miles out, which protects us from open ocean swells. The sound in between has moderate seas. If you want big seas, you can head southwest and be on big open ocean swells.
But there's amazing kayaking throughout coastal Alaska. The panhandle has the inside passage, with miles of relatively protected waters. You can kayak in Glacier Bay, or up near Homer, or the Aleutians if you're badass.
If you go with a tour, be careful who you book with. There are operations that take care to bring people to places that are good for beginners to kayak. For example one company here brings their clients to a secluded cove where people won't face big swells or wind or boat wakes. But another company launches people right from downtown, where they immediately face big boat wakes, and the wind can pick up uncomfortably for beginners.
For Gray Whales, Bahia Magdalena, Puerto Vallarta and Laguna Ojo de Liebre all have great whale watching, and in Bahia Magdalena you can pet them from a boat; don't know about restrictions on kayaks there but it should be open in Puerto Vallarta (just don't get in the water, too much bacteria/jellies). There's also Depoe Bay in Oregon and Monterey Bay in California, and Lime Kiln State Park in Washington for Orca watching.
Petting a whale from a boat is an amazing experience -- I did this 23 years ago in Ojo de Liebre. The mother Gray Whales would push their calves up to the boats so that they could receive some petting on the nose. There was no material reward for doing so -- they didn't get food or anything. I got the distinct impression that they understood that having an emotional bond with humans was important, and that they were doing it for that reason.
A 2 hour drive south of Anchorage is Seward, where there are several kayaking companies which will take you out into Resurrection Bay. People often see a variety of wildlife on these excursions, such as humpbacks, orcas, sea lions, jellyfish, etc. A cool kayaking trip from Seward is to Caines Head recreation area, where you can hike through boreal forest up to an old abandoned World War 2 fort with beautiful views of the bay. Homer is about 3 hours south of Anchorage and is also a good place for sea kayaking.
I personally have more experience with packrafting, which I highly recommend. High quality lightweight packrafts can easily be carried on/in a day pack. A recent packrafting trip I did: drive 1 hour south of Anchorage to Portage railroad stop, take the train 20 minutes south to the Spencer Glacier stop, paddle around the lagoon adjacent to the glacier (don't get too close, it calves frequently and can be quite dangerous), then paddle all the way back to the car on the Placer River (not a technical river)... about 8 hours total trip time.
My priest was just in Sitka for several weeks on sabbatical. There's a significant Eastern Orthodox population there and I may be visiting myself next year. If I do, I will be sure to find time for whales.
We don't know for sure if it really is showing appreciation at the end, but humpback whales are social animals so IMO it's plausible. It certainly makes a big effort at breaching despite being trapped for a long time and despite there being no other whales nearby. Why would it do that if it's not trying to communicate with the humans?
Interesting! I don't know, of course, but it strikes me that it could just be pure happiness. After I give my dog a bath outside and let him off the leash, he tears around the yard.
Not to be a wet blanket, but Wiki suggests a few other reasons that it might breach that might be in line with being stuck for some time in a dingy net.
Or maybe the whale was just having a lot of fun now that it could move.
Or maybe it's a really big thank you like you suggest :)
If it's either of the latter though, I do find that interesting behavior regardless.
Humpback whales apparently have to defend their juveniles against hunting orcas. It is surprising that they would defend other species in the same way, but it seems likely to be the same instinct that causes them to protect their own, rather than altruism.
Then again, maybe you could make the same claim about humans. :-)
To me, this is what it is. If young Humpbacks are vulnerable for a certain amount of time, being good at protecting them would a good idea. They can't risk losing that skill since every time they fail, a young Humpback dies.
It wouldn't need to involve cognition and logic, it could be evolutionary coincidence: humpback whales with behavior that happens to result in fewer orcas nearby would have more surviving offspring, so this behavior would be selected for.
Maybe the whales respond to protect weaker "cute" animals in the way humans do. When we see an injured bird, we instinctively want to help it. Maybe it's a side effect of being genetically "programmed" to protect the young of our/their own species? Maybe the "pattern matching" is matching a bit more than just the same species.
Many mammals are supposed to be able to recognize the your in other mammal species based on some fairly universal markers (large head to body ratio, larger facial features), and respond differently to younger and older members of a species. Many Dogs are known to have exhibited this behavior, and treat human babies distinctly different (more gently). I think you are correct and it's entirely possible is child-rearing instincts firing in response to other species that resemble their own young closely (other young whales) or superficially (other, smaller marine mammals).
If I may play Devil's advocate here - it is very easy to anthropomorphize animal behaviour. There are numerous examples in the animal kingdom of animals protecting and even rearing animals from other species. This could be down to genetics and learned behaviour and nothing to do with altruism, or other noble sentiments.
Part of me says it is highly unlikely that Humpback whales have a vendetta against killer whales and are the policeman of the oceans, but the bigger part of me, wants to believe that they are exactly that!
The books by Frans de Waal about this topic are very interesting. He's a dutch ethologist, researching the social behaviour and emotions of animals, mainly primates I think.
Some of his quotes, source Wikipedia:
"To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us."
"In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores."
> "Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores."
Well, that was a good reason why we initially liked them, but the last few millennia of genetic modification through selective breeding to alter their behavior and appearance for our benefit hasn't hurt either...
Yes, dogs are the worst possible place to look for ‘anthropomorphic’ behaviour — they've had thirty or forty thousand years of evolutionary pressure to please humans.
Well, depending on whether you are looking for naturally occurring anthropomorphic behavior, they are either the best or worst place to look. :)
That is, they are probably good evidence for some emotions in animals, but fairly useless in their current incarnation as to whether it was naturally occurring. Interestingly, it's entirely possible (and likely, IMO) that they exhibited some of this behavior originally due to their social nature, and this is what causes humans to start the process of domestication in the first place (not that it was likely a decision like that).
What's really interesting is how quickly changes, both behavioral and physical happen during domestication (and how quickly domestication works, possibly on the order of a decade or so)[1].
‘Behaviour’ was the wrong word for me to use. I should have said, dogs are the worst place to look for human-like internal mental state. If your dog looks contrite when they've done something wrong, do they feel contrite, or have they just mechanically evolved to make you think they do?
Years ago I had a lurcher, raised from a pup. One day I noticed that if you spoke to him in a stern manner - even if he had done absolutely nothing wrong he would hang his head low and look up at you, and put his tail between his legs as if he was guilty of something bad and wanted to look contrite.
It seems to me that it may be a long ago learned, now instinctive, behaviour to react that way to a particular tone of human voice.
It might have a simpler explanation. Maybe what you are seeing isn't guilt, but submission, and you are mistaking it for guilt. When spoken to a certain way, submission is the correct social response. This is true in people as well. If you have a work superior approach you in an angry manner, your best option is likely not to respond angrily or indifferently.
A good question, and very complicated. For example, what if dogs have always been capable of that emotion, but expressed it differently? What if the evolved response is not the emotion, but to match a specific behavior to the emotion? What if the evolved response is not attached to the emotion and just for our benefit, but the emotion does exist in other situations? It would be so much easier if we could accurately communicate with our dogs.
And that the brains that support our minds are part of said bodies. Eg corvids with their tiny little bird brains are apparently capable of feats of intellect that are very human-like in various ways.
>If I may play Devil's advocate here - it is very easy to anthropomorphize animal behaviour.
I think that we also very easily 'anthropomorphize' human behavior; that is to say that we superimpose our own assumptions onto other people's behaviour.
We are animals too, and the rational part is only a thin, recent addition to our brains.
I believe many animals are just as intelligent as us in their own way.
So altruism is not genetics? We share like 90% of same genes with whales, and most of rest 10% of different genes have just small difference, separating humans from animals is just simply stupid.
When a certain type of great cat kills, say, an antelope, it will look around carefully. Humans first describing this behavior assumed the cats were feeling guilty for killing and wanted to check if there were any "witnesses".
Nowadays, this behavior is interpreted as checking for hyenas, who like to snatch away prey from other predators.
I would not consider this behavior dumb or uninteresting, but it is - probably - for a different reason than a human observer might naively assume.
Being aware that animals might do things for different reasons than humans is not dismissing the animal's motives, it can be a key to understanding its behavior. It is not at all the same as assuming an animal's internal life is dumb and uninteresting, at least I do not think the GP wanted to imply that.
Anthropomorphism is anthropomorphic. We are animals, mammals. Whales are also mammal animals. To attribute our behaviours as something solely human is ridiculous hubris and a vestige of hundreds of years of scientific ignorance.
It's interesting that we have such a hard time accepting the emotion of altruism both in humans and animals. The author of the articles states: "could just be revenge". Revenge is in many ways more senseless then altruism for evolutionary purposes (unless you directly attack killer whales that threaten you, but one could argue that that's a form of self-defence), but from our ego perspective it feels more intuitive, at least to the author. There are also comments in this thread that reflect this way of thinking.
I don't deny that altruism exists, but to me it's just another form of egoism. Nobody can convince me that they have ever done anything for ANY other reason than because of the belief that it will be good for them or that they'll get some sort of kick out of it. Not Mother Theresa, not anyone, ever. Because it's not possible. If you don't put your own interests first, you have nothing to give to others anyway.
Moreover, people who are not egoists freak me out. To me, such people are the ultimate hypocrites and I fell that I can't trust them with anything.
It seems like this point of view is unassailable because for every example that, in regular understanding, would be selfless behaviour, the definition of self-interest is stretched to encompass it.
- Anonymous philanthropy => feelings of self worth
- Low reward public service (Mother Theresa) => fame and influence
- Parents sacrificing personal good for kids => some kind of evolutionary advantage
- Falling on a grenade => Avoiding survivors guilt
I don't mean to present strawman arguments for these scenarios - if they are silly I apologize. In any case, it seems to me that denial of altruism always ends up stretching the definition of selfish and shrinking the definition of selfless, so that any scenario can fit.
Most of the sacrifices I make for my kids feel like the exact opposite of self-gain. "Do something I want to do" vs "do something the kid would benefit from" is a choice presented to every parent every day.
I don't think that the possibility that the latter might have some indirect self-benefit keeps it from being an act of altruism, for any reasonable definition of altruism. I mean, "some kind of evolutionary advantage" is a plausible explanation for pretty much any behavior by any animal on Earth.
That's easy to answer. Taking care of your children is not aultruism, it's a genetic inevitability. Your genes have a 'selfish' desire to propogate themselves into the future. Your children are the means of doing this. To protect this investment your genes have gifted you with hormones that make you a happy and willing slave to these little bundles of genetic immortality. :-)
This is a cop-out. There is nothing anyone does that couldn't be plausibly cast as an evolutionary imperative. You gave your kid the last bite of your dinner? Obviously you were trying to maximize his chance of surviving and reproducing. You kept the last bite for yourself? Obviously you were nourishing yourself to ensure your ability to provide for your kids in the future. You gave the last bite to the neighbor's kid? You must have been supporting your community because your kids thrive when your tribe thrives. You sent it off to starving children in Africa? Clearly you were trying to cultivate a reputation of charitable giving in order to increase your status in the tribe. This is a parlor game, not a reasonable way to talk about whether whales can display behavior we usually associate only with humans.
> Your genes have a 'selfish' desire to propogate themselves into the future.
Common misunderstanding, but this is not true. Genes do not have any desires at all.
Dawkins wrote "The Selfish Gene" to explore a metaphor, not explain how biology actually works. He thought it would be an interesting way of looking at evolution, and he was right. It was so interesting that people started taking him literally.
Anyway, it seems obvious that taking care of kids is not a genetic inevitability, because of the large numbers of parents who fail to do a good job of taking care of their kids.
I agree. I wonder if a better strategy would be to amend the definition of altruism to include doing something for someone else because it makes you feel good. Surely most would agree that "it makes me feel good to help someone" vs "I financially gained from helping someone" are not the same type of "selfishness" (excluding the genetic reductionist explanations).
My problem with this argument is there's an underlying assumption that the end of the day our basic core motive is selfish/egotistic, it might be so but many who use this assumption as a base of their arguments do not bother to prove it because believe that it is so.
Another viewpoint: Did Mother Theresa perform her acts for fame and influence? Or did she receive fame and influence for performing the acts that she would have performed anyway? It just so happens that people like being helped, and will generally feel friendly and helpful to those who help them. Do this enough, and you'll end up with a pretty large sphere of influence, even if that was not ever a goal.
What's your definition of altruism? I let a guy behind me at the grocery check-out in front. He had one item and I had an entire belt full, and the express lines (for low item counts) were all closed. Why? Because I know that situation sucks, and it's what I would have wanted to happen for myself. Does that make it egoist? I don't know. I never expect to see that person again; I never expect anything to result from that transaction other than my leaving the store a minute later than I could have.
The gp will find some way to construe your actions as selfish because doing selfless things is harder to understand for them than the mental gymnastics of figuring out what you're trying to get from the situation. People who are selfish assholes are usually unable to empathize with people who do selfless things, probably because they're bad at empathizing in general.
GP might possibly be what I've heard referred to as a "transactional" personality -- every interaction is a transaction and the goal is to extract value from the transaction. These are the people you see on caller ID and mutter, "What do they want now?", because they only contact you when they want something. And, of course, people do have a tendency to attribute to others the same motivations as themselves.
You seem to be constructing a definition of altruism that isn't just practically impossible, but /theoretically/ impossible for anyone to meet, since you can always say "Oh, but they're /actually/ doing it for their own benefit!" Such a definition is unfalsifiable (akin to conspiracy theories) and thus not terribly useful.
I think it is easy to come up with examples of people doing purely altruistic things. One simple example would be an atheist that sacrifices himself for his country. He knows there is no reward at the end of the tunnel and may not even particularly want to do it but maybe feels it is his duty for the "greater good". Purely altruistic behavior can be justified by anyone who is fully committed to, say, utilitarianism and I'm sure there are other moral philosophies that can justify it without any consideration for personal reward.
I think you have to distinguish the case between someone doing a kind deed and feeling good versus someone doing a kind deed because they expect to feel good. Feeling good because you did something good is involuntary and for most people unavoidable. It can be a side-effect of the deed, rather than the cause.
I agree that altrustic acts are prompted by the expected emotional reward that is built into us. In that sense, altruism is selfish. I disagree that this idea of "selfish altruism" means that altruism is not to be respected, that it is hypocrisy, or that it is ok to always chase your own self-interest.
The Prisoner's dilemma shows quite clearly that there exist problems where, if every agent chases their own interests exclusively, all agents end up in a sub-optimal state.
The whole concept of civilization is based on the willingness of individuals to abide by rules, but it's important to realize that following the rules does not benefit you. You expect to benefit from the rules because you expect that other people will also follow the rules. But you following or not following them has almost no impact on the willingness of others to comply. In short, it is in everyone's interest that as many people as possible abide by the law, but it is in no individual's interest to abide by the law as long as they can avoid being caught.
Society wouldn't work if a large chunk of the population were completely unable to put the interests of the collective above their own interests. We'd all be committing exactly the amount of crime we think we could get away with, everyone would be untrustworthy and corrupt.
It doesn't matter why people are altruistic, or that their reasons are ultimately selfish. Altruism should be respected, selflessness should be praised as a virtue. Selfishness should never, ever be praised as a virtue.
Come on, how can you possibly call this "self-less"?? If you're doing something for someone you love, it's because you love them. That's the ultimate good-feeling. You're doing it to feel good, period. I hate people who do things like this and then say "I acted selflessly for you". No, you didn't, you moron. You acted as selfish as can be. Now, thank you very much for doing what you did for me, but don't EVER expect me to pay you back in any form, or to thank you, or to even acknowledge what you did, because then there wasn't anything selfless about it, was there?
If you love someone and you've done something for them, good for you. Yay. Move on.
I think a big problem with your concepts about altruism and selflessness is assuming the actor had the choice to act or not act, so by definition if they acted it must be because they wanted to; therefore, its not selfless.
However, life is not usually a choice of act or don't act (help a love one or not). Moreover, when people make selfless decisions, we usually define them as such because the choice is action A or action B (buy a loved one a gift instead of yourself) and action A is objectively more beneficial to the actor (buy oneself a gift) but they still choose action B because the benefits it brings to others and the decision was based on putting others before oneself. In other words by sacrificing act A to do act B, you are right the actor will usually receive some subjective inherent benefit of doing B (it feels good to buy loved ones a gift), but the decision is not made on that basis because A would have made the actor feel even better than B, but the actor made the decision on the basis of putting others needs before their own.
Have you never done something you don't want to do to help someone else?
Well - of course there has to be some charge somewhere in your brain build up before you do anything. But your reasoning is essentially just playing with words - b/c of course if you do something for somebody b/c you love them, then you do what you do B/C you love them ... well.
> Nobody can convince me that they have ever done anything for ANY other reason than because of the belief that it will be good for them or that they'll get some sort of kick out of it.
That's called being an idiot. Your government has brainwashed you into thinking of such acts as noble and courageous. They are not. Acts like this do not deserve admiration or respect. Encouraging this in the name of "patriotism" is beyond despicable.
But to get back to the point, as an individual, the only reason you would do something like this is because you feel better knowing that you have sacrificed your life to save other people's lives. Because, presumably, you couldn't live with yourself if you didn't. So if that's your way of dealing with the situation - that's fine, I guess. I still think you're an egoist for doing it.
I suspect people fall on grenades more to save their friends in the blast zone than some ideal of patriotism. There are cases not involving military/combat as well, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Oates.
You appear to have constructed a weird, intentionally specifically narrow definition of altruism as a strawman. Congratulations on slaying it.
I like most people do a lot of things out of habit. Suggesting people need complex motivations for actions completely fails to account for basic human behavior.
I think it depends whether you are arguing on a philosophical or on a biological/chemical level. On these low levels we do stuff, because substances in our brain reward us for doing so even if it might hurt ourself in the long run. So I do not believe in true altruism either, which does not mean that people actively have egoistic motives when doing altruistic actions.
What does believing in an emotion mean? Egotism is arguably no more real then altruism. If your "reward in the brain" statement is correct why is that egotism? If that reward system drives a father to kills himself for his child that's not very egotistic. Why in a biological system would the "self" be preferred above the larger picture? This is definitely not argued in evolutionary theory. In the end it's very much connected to our core motives for doing what we do, and surviving is not always on the top of that list.
I don't believe that people do altruistic things, because on a biological level we do stuff, because we like the feeling in our brain, therefore we do it for ourself, which is egotistic.
Truly altruistic would be something we just do without any benefit for ourself. I just argued that this only exists on a philosophical level, not on a biological level, so I don't believe in the concept unless we agree to treat the brain as a blackbox.
So do you believe in free will at all? Or is everything just a deterministic chemical cascade of inputs and outputs, in which case the answer to all this discussion is "mu". [0]
Ah, you got me. Indeed I think so, but I find it nice that the complexity of the universe hides it from us and it only occasionally comes up in discussions like this. Thanks for the interesting link.
> I find it nice that the complexity of the universe hides it from us and it only occasionally comes up in discussions like this.
I agree. I find arguments for lack of free will strange. If we don't have it, then what's the point of anything, including arguing whether we have it? It's not about being right or wrong for me, but rather that I'll always accept the illusion of free will, because anything else is just boring and depressing.
And who knows, maybe in the end we'll discover that there's randomized quantum effects that break the determinism. While not quite free will, at least it's an out from the boring and depressing alternative.
We are tiny unimportant ants on a tiny and unimportant planet floating meaningless through time and space and yet we are alive and are at the same time already distanced so far from the act of surviving. I think there is no point in anything, but consciousness and thoughts are a pretty awesome compensation to me.
I personally believe that quantum effects don't break the determinism, just because I like to. Otherwise there is more space for a god and I am to lazy to invent my own, while I am absolutely certain that the current ideas of him are wrong. I like the idea that there has been something at the beginning much more. Then it can be something simple like "time does not flow linearly" and you are done.
In the end it does not matter whether we will take even more blue pills or somehow get to experience the red pill. Either way it is a hell of a show and not boring at all.
> I just argued that this only exists on a philosophical level
That definition of altruism doesn't even work on a philosophical level, since one can always level an unfalsifiable charge that /some/ part of the brain is perceiving the altruistic action as a reward.
On a similar note: last week i observed a group of seagulls relentlessly attacking a phantom quadcopter that was flying over their territory. The quad clearly wasn't trying to eat their offspring so it could be that the whales are just asserting their territorial rights..
He could mean asserting its rights by not allowing other animals to hunt in its territory. I don't know if that is common behavior among animals though.
Only some of them. The transient orca are the ones who eat mammals and don't have large social groupings. The resident orca have larger (matriarchal) social groups and don't eat other mammals, just fish.
It's always amazing to me that we have multiple intelligent (how intelligent is uncertain), social species right here on our own planet, and we spend such a tiny fraction of our energies as a society trying to communicate with them.
Your comment and the parent really surprise me.
Passing such moral judgements based on the diet of a species seems a bit 'youtubish'.
Using the same logic one could argue that humpback whales are the real assholes since they protect those seals and sea lions so they can prey on those tiny, little penguins which are the cutest.
> Passing such moral judgements based on the diet of a species
Causing harm to social intelligent species, such as by eating them, is objective. In theory another species could eat plants and also attack mammals for fun all the time. That species would also be assholes. This isn't a judgement based on 'diet', it's a judgement based on how they interact with others.
> since they protect those seals and sea lions
That's not the same logic. The same logic might lead you to call seals and sea lions assholes, but it wouldn't extend to the whales.
I think I agree with you 100% based on what I think your comment reveals about your ideas.
The point I was trying to make is that it's too often that we judge animal behavior based on our mental constructs, when I think it makes no sense at all even for the most intelligent of the animal species.
Somebody pointed out that we are not so different from animals, and so it shouldn't be a big stretch to apply our labels to animal behavior. But I think we are so far from animal behavior that it makes it very difficult to analize/understand it without a really big effort and a long time of study. Scientists get very close, but internet comments are too often narrow-minded.
Orcas are not 'killers', at least not more than any other predator. They are very intelligent and gregarious, and they eat other animals. Jumping from this to 'they are assholes' was, in my opinion, not called for. In what 'interaction with others' was this based on? I think a real judge would have a hard time trying to distill intent from animal interactions.
Your second point is completely right.
But as a matter of fact, I think that both whales, seals, sea lions and all animals in general are all fine gentlemen. I have my doubts about that monkey pulling the legs (literally, and the tails) of two tigers, though.
> The transient orca are the ones who eat mammals and don't have large social groupings. The resident orca have larger (matriarchal) social groups and don't eat other mammals, just fish.
Source? Also, what does "resident orca" mean in this context?
Some cetologists think that Killer whale is not one species, but a cryptic species complex, with (at least) four very related and very similar (but not identically marked) species. Different ecotypes seem avoiding to breed with each other and are evolving independently.
Both 'transient' and 'type B' eat marine mammals. Some 'type A' chase cetaceans also. The smaller of all 'Type C' eat fishes. Some species mix in a gradient and things can get very complicated. In the end we could have only one or up to nine species of killer whales here.
Many of the smart things that dogs do are conditioned responses -- they adapt their wiring for pack behavior to human relations and are perceptive about many emotional and other cues.
I believe that whales have been observed performing more complex creative or problem solving tasks, and can probably communicate concepts between whales.
Why would we communicate with them? I mean, it's not like we're trying very hard to communicate with every single human subgroup either. And some of them we definitely NOT want to communicate with.
Reverse being true; if I was a whale, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to get involve in that human business and become so bitter that I'd lose the drive to be altruist ;-)
I have to agree. In about 1977 I was sailing my small sailboat about 20 miles offshore, and about 50 miles north of San Diego. A single large Orca jumped out of the water 4 times right next to my boat, getting higher that the top of my mast, and each time crashing into the water next to my boat, which rocked violently each time. I lay down in the bottom of the cockpit, and fell off the wind a bit so I could steer for several minutes without having to see where I was going.
The whole experience was unnerving.
In comparison, I once had an old grey whale lift its head out of the water within 3 or 4 feet of that boat and it just gazed at me and my friends for a short while before gently lowering itself and moving off. That boat was only 22 feet long and the grey whale seemed like it was being gentle about being near us.
> Let's hope one day we will be assholes in space.
Plot twist! You know that alien space invaders from the movies, who come to Earth to drain all its resources and go somewhere else? That's us from the future! And the head of the invasion is probably some poor space-fisherman saying "sustainability something blah blah, I have to make a living, you know!".
Some form of brood parasitism, maybe? I mean it is known that orcas hunt whale calves and presumably this involves an instinctive reaction from the adults to the calf's distress signal.
So perhaps various other preys have learnt to imitate this distress call in order to gain protection from what are possibly the only animals in the sea capable of fighting an orca.
Or maybe whales just hate orcas and want them to starve.
I wish we could have a big long term experiment where maybe we try to teach the whales to let us know if they understand altruism and whether they could be taught to communicate an intention to us directly by flipping a switch to activate lights or something like that. It seems like whales are aware of what they are doing in a deeper way than other animals but we just don't know how to access their intentions through communication.
When they first arrive in the spring you can see their vertebrae as they arch their back for a dive. After eating all summer, you can see how much they've filled out by the time they pass through on their way south in the fall. When they arch for a dive they've fattened up enough that you can't see individual vertebrae anymore.
It's an amazing experience to paddle a kayak out into a calm bay and sit for an hour surrounded by a dozen humpbacks, or to sit in a calm stretch of ocean with whales surfacing as far as you can see in every direction. They'll come within ten feet of a kayak, and you know they'll never bother you. They just seem curious about what's out in the water with them.
They engage in bubble-net feeding. A group of humpbacks circle underwater beneath a school of herring. They let out bubbles and build a wall of bubbles around the herring. The whales then swim up inside the bubbles and break the surface with their mouths open, feasting on the trapped herring. It's wild to see a ring of bubbles appear near you on the surface, and then see half a dozen whales rise up out of the water with their mouths open.
My favorite part of being close to whales is listening to them breathe. You can hear the size of their lungs from the sound of their breaths.
If you've never been close to whales, try to get on a whale watching tour. They're just incredible to see in person.