> Or, maybe this is just a new “fad” for juvenile orcas that could go out of fashion as they grow up, Jared Towers, director of Canadian research organization Bay Cetology, tells NPR. In the 1990s, scientists observed another strange orca trend, but it has since faded away.
> "They'd kill fish and just swim around with this fish on their head," Towers tells NPR. "We just don't see that anymore.”
Imagining the behavioral / fashion trends of Orcas over time is really fascinating :D
I'm betting some very intelligent animals realized humans are very reluctant to cause them direct harm (read: very illegal to hurt an orca) and have decide to have some fun with the humans.
Tik Tok for orcas would not be a positive, but I get the feeling they are doing a "look what I did" all the same.
This is probably what you mean, but I imagine it's just a lack of negative evolutionary reinforcement of behaviours cause those behaviours to proliferate.
That being said, I'm convinced we continue to deeply underestimate the intelligence and competence of numerous species, even today when we like to talk about how ridiculously smart dolphins and whales and dogs and birds and primates etc... are.
I remember thinking, "I will be that dad who does not underestimate my kids capabilities. I won't hold them back." And my 5yo is still absolutely blowing me away with his ability to build complex redstone machines in Minecraft. I think humans are just really good at underestimating competence.
Our very definition of intelligence is part of the issue. There's no question that animals exceed our knowledge in specific domains, a bird who can fly must be vastly more knowledgeable about variable wind conditions than we are. There's a great scene in Lev Grossman's The Magicians where they speak to a talking bear, but all the bear wants to talk about is caves, and area in which his knowledge is so complete that the humans cannot really even talk to him. But our definition of intelligence is narrowed to domains which we live in. That tends to be a wider than most animals, but it's hardly complete.
Reminds of the Geifer grizzly. It raided human dwellings for food, signing its death warrant.
It wore a radio collar, so it seems like it shouldn't have been a problem to track down. Yet, it evaded hunters for over a year, while still raiding houses for food, without ever being seen.
It learned it could cross into Canada for safety when the pressure from the hunters tracking it got to be too much, and then return and invade more houses.
Eventually, it was shot and killed by a random hunter in Canada who had no idea who that bear was. The bear didn't know Canadians could also be dangerous, otherwise it probably wouldn't have let anyone see it there either...
I think a lot of animals are probably very good at what they've evolved to do. Bears are great at tracking and surviving being tracked (probably more typically by bigger bears); reading about it felt like getting a glimpse into another animal's domain and being totally outmatched.
We have baboons and they are smart. They can open all sorts of doors. They ignore you if you are a woman or don't have anything in your hand that could cause them harm. They know how to bluff an attack making you throw away food that is in your hands. The stand upright make scary noises and charge at you. Quite frightening and most just throw whatever it is in your hands away. So yes animals can be smart.
I used to be arrogant about this in my teens and think that people who aren't good at maths and science have a lower IQ. Till one day I learnt about the different types of intelligence - linguistic, logical, geospatial, social, musical, empathetic etc. - that really made me rethink how I look at people, and how flawed the whole IQ thing is. When we talk about someone having a "gift" or a knack for something, we don't realise we are appreciating the intelligence of that person in that area.
I have gotten into fishing this summer and _damn_ do those pro/YouTube dudes know a lot about fishing. They study bass behavior and do all kinds of experimentation with tackle and lures and the time of day and every conceivable variable that could affect the bite.
When I was getting into weightlifting, which I had always dismissed as a pursuit for dumb bro types, I was similarly impressed with the knowledge out there about nutrition, anatomy, the way that muscles tear and repair and grow, etc.
I think it's an all too common "nerd social fallacy" to assume that people who don't have that "traditional" scientific/math intelligence aren't smart, but as I've gotten older it seems to me that, on average, most humans are pretty damn smart about one thing or another.
>I think it's an all too common "nerd social fallacy" to assume that people who don't have that "traditional" scientific/math intelligence aren't smart
Dunning-Kruger effect. It's all too common on places like HN.
Eh we are a bubble. Many people assume because you are good at math or something that you must be skinny and weak and not into weightlifting or fly fishing, or you can’t get a partner.
In Lem's "Golem XIV" Golem (a machine built to help plan World War III) explains to the humans that its intelligence isn't just greater than theirs along some singular dimension, like it understands way more about high energy physics or jazz or ethics than they do, but is instead categorically greater - and worse that it is definitely categorically impossible for humans to achieve such intelligence.
The humans really don't like that and Lem's story struggles to really sell it because of course Lem was human, so it's hard to play the role of "Machine which is just categorically more intelligent than my whole species" effectively.
One of the clever tricks in Vinge's "Tatja Grimm's World" is that Tatja is way more intelligent than everybody else on her planet, yet because of why she's more intelligent than everybody else Vinge doesn't need to somehow imagine being far smarter than he is.
A good analogy is looking at how chess grandmasters talk about playing against computers, especially early on when it wasn’t known whether the best computers would ever be able to beat the best humans. They say it’s like playing a super intelligence.
Interestingly, I believe the engine + grandmaster combination can still defeat the best engines.
Kasparov also believes this to be true, but the last example I can recall of top level player teaming up with a computer was in 2014, when Nakamura played exhibition match with engine against Stockfish and lost 1.5/0.5, since then computers only got better. Maybe someone dedicated to playing computers could perform better, but I doubt it, since anti-computer chess haven't really been a thing outside of bullet and maybe blitz for years, now that computers search way deeper and prune better.
What an excellent show (although very weird and crazy too). The books showed what to me is one of the more interesting ways for an author to come up with a systematic system of magic. It isn't just saying a spell or anything like that. In the book (spoilers), only the most intelligent people can begin to take all the variables into account in doing a spell (hand signs, words, positions of the planetary bodies, temperature, humidity, constellations, phase of the moon, mood of the caster, and a ton of other things are all factored in and tables are cross-referenced. The author did a better job of explaining it.
In relation to your above comment I felt they did a good job throughout the series showing the difficulties in communicating amongst lowly people and entities and creatures that are higher up in the pecking order.
As with spiders' k. domains it seems. More limited than I thought. My garden orb weaver found a dried leaf as large as herself in her huge web and proceeded to truss it up as nicely as she could before belatedly realizing that the operation was not going to be to her advantage.
Yeah that's very true. Perhaps I don't mean "evolution" in a classical sense but rather: animals probe the world, and behaviours that aren't discouraged somehow are more likely to be replicated among the community.
I think it's the converse: after we've hunted orcas to near extinction, that very intelligent species realized they were no longer the apex predator, and could never win against a land-based species. There are ZERO documented incidents of orcas attacking humans in the water. They've chosen a cultural taboo against hurting humans, in hopes that we would no longer see them as an enemy and stop hunting them. And it worked!
Guessing the rudder attacks are either teenage pranks or misunderstanding that boats belong to humans.
Cetaceans have been recorded to have been non-aggressive, even helpful towards humans throughout history. That's why we have religious mythologies and regional/national mythologies in which cetaceans are told to save humans or they are treated as deities or spirit figures to appeal to.
300 years ago, if a fisherman got eaten by an orca, would that have been recorded as "eaten by an orca" or "eaten by a fish/sea monster"? It wasn't until the mid 18th century that cetaceans were asserted to not be fish, it took another century or more for this perspective to permeate popular culture.
For instance, in Moby-Dick (1851) Herman Melville dedicates an entire chapter to explaining the taxonomy of cetaceans and says they aren't fish because they breath air, have lungs, have horizontal tails, etc. But then he says whalers scoff at this distinction and consider them fish because they live in the water.
Yah but that is a bit of an extreme situation, you can't blame an intelligent sentient being that needs stimulation and freedom from turning murderous after it was abducted from its family in the wild and caged up in a tiny pool for an excrutiatingly decades long life. The violent part is putting orcas into that situation in the first place, they are orders of magnitude too smart and curious for that. The murder that followed can't really be said to be an example of a species being prone to attacking a human in general, it is a very specific set of circumstances.
i bet these teenagers attacking boats were hurt by a sail once… or some of them were and taught others (orca attack in Portugal region are not a phenomena exclusively to the article publication year) . orcas have different behavior patterns on different groups roaming the ocean
>I'm betting some very intelligent animals realized humans are very reluctant to cause them direct harm (read: very illegal to hurt an orca) and have decide to have some fun with the humans.
didn't work for that walrus Freya. You just need a few not even very bad just not very good humans, especially if they happen to be government bureaucrats. Hope there is more protection for orcas.
Yea we apparently went from the MyFish era to the FinBook era and we’re so behind we’re only now finding out.
The native peoples in the Northwest say the orcas change into people and walk among the villagers. They also say that humans that drown at sea become killer whales and when they interact with boats like this story or swim really close to shore they’re trying to communicate with their human families
"whats up its ya boi xxKingOrca200 back at it again about to rudderprank this boat sponsored by nord SeaPN you know how we do. shout out to the beluga tier supporters and the silly fishhead bro's in the pod dont forget to like subscribe and ring the diving bell"
And then, Andy Whalol came around and took seashell media by storm by spamming GIFs of his version of NFTs (No Fungicide Tuna, tuna can with organic tomato sauce).
The article mentions it. One of the most mind-blowing facts is that there has never been a recorded human death caused by an Orca.
There are many possible explanations for it, selective eaters, not tasty, knowing what they are getting themselves into.
At the same time they are curious, playful, and it seems emotional, if they have trends like breaking boats & carrying dead fish. It's a miracle such playfulness never ever accidentally killed a human.
After Sperm whales they have the largest brains in the world. Of course big sections of that is dedicated to their complicated bodily functions. But I think we are most likely severely underestimating their intelligence.
Maybe you mean in the wild? A high-profile death-by-Orca occurred at Seaworld [1] but I think this was more of an intentional revenge rather than accidental playfulness.
> but I think this was more of an intentional revenge rather than accidental playfulness.
At first blush this struck me as a silly comment, so I read the article... and boy, are you right. It really does sound like an intentional, even methodical killing. Here's the description from the wiki:
> As part of the end-of-show routine, [Dawn Brancheau] was at the edge of the pool, rubbing Tilikum's head. She was lying with her face next to Tilikum's on a slide-out, which is a platform submerged about a foot into the water. SeaWorld claims that she was pulled into the water by her ponytail. Some witnesses reported seeing Tilikum grab Brancheau by the arm or shoulder. The orca's move seems to have been very quick, pulling her underwater and drowning her. At least a dozen patrons witnessed Brancheau in the water with Tilikum. Employees used nets and threw food at Tilikum in an attempt to distract him. Moving from pool to pool in the complex, they eventually directed Tilikum to a smaller, medical pool, where it would be easier to calm him. After approximately 45 minutes, Tilikum released Brancheau's body.
I suppose I'm anthropomorphizing and making a lot of assumptions, but holding that poor woman under water for 45 minutes strikes me as making sure that she's dead--particularly since its caretakers (who, presumably, have a strong understanding of how to influence its behavior) were actively attempting to entice it to let her go. For 45 minutes.
Honestly, it's a bit surprising that people find this surprising. Orcas are air-breathing mammals, and conscious breathers at that. They kill other mammals, namely whales, often by drowning them intentionally. They know what drowning is.
The other is that these are massive animals placed in water prisons, constantly exposed to the sun and concrete and fed fish they wouldn't eat in the wild. It would be like putting a human in a small 3'x3' box with the top exposed to the sun and fed dog food and then being surprised that they're on edge.
That orca definitely killed the trainer on purpose or did it in a way such that it didn't care whether she lived or died and was releasing frustration. An orca could bite a human in half in the same way that a human can bite through jello, which shows that the orca was displaying frustration and exasperation. Orcas have committed suicide while in captivity, by intentionally and repeatedly ramming their heads into the concrete walls to cause brain hemorrhages or starving themselves.
To be frank, it is mindblowing to me that people view these incidences as examples of orca intelligence rather than exhibitions of human cruelty and unintelligence.
> It would be like putting a human in a small 3'x3' box
I get that you're trying to make a point, but this kind of hyperbole only discredits it.
> Orcas have committed suicide while in captivity, by intentionally and repeatedly ramming their heads into the concrete walls to cause brain hemorrhages
I think you mean AN orca did this (Hugo), and it was after being kept in solitary isolation for 12 years, something that SeaWorld thankfully doesn't do.
Wild orcas travel on average 40 miles a day, can travel 100 miles in a single day, and make round trips in the thousands of miles. They dive several hundred feet every day. It isn't hyperbole unless you're going to bikeshed over the exact footage. The chemicals in the pool and drugs they are given are also another thing.
> I think you mean AN orca did this
Hugo was with a tank mate Lolita at the time but had been in isolation prior to that.
There are cases of captive orcas arguably attempting suicide, either by intentional ramming, stranding, or starvation. It is indeed hard to find good data on this (I wonder why...), and so it is hard to state absolutes.
This ignores the much more common and documented violent outbursts towards both trainers and fellow tankmates/cellmates induced by the stress they experience in captivity.
Showed my math in another comment, but your claim is off by a factor of about 370, so that’s how it’s hyperbole. That is not bikeshedding, that’s just very very wrong.
Mixing up Miami Seaquarium in a discussion about SeaWorld is confused. The two environments are totally incomparable.
If you believe Blackfish, dolphins (which orcas are a type of) can just stop breathing if they want to commit suicide, so the ramming of the heads is moot. Humans occasionally ram their heads without intent to kill, so why would orcas be different?
It is bikeshedding. My comment about the box was in general a sentiment and an illustrative and qualitative example, not something that can be directly compared enough to calculate some exact number and certainly not something where some ideal number affects the sentiment.
For example, the average American walks 1.5-2 miles a day, so that's a factor of over x20 for the average travel distance of orcas (which by the way is average linear distance, i.e., starting point to ending point, and not total travel which is much higher). Humans don't dive and live very horizontal lives, while orcas dive 100-500 feet multiple times every day. Their tanks at SeaWorld are only approximately 30 feet deep, lesser at other places.
So your "factor of about 370" doesn't make any sense, because it myopically only takes into account relative size and a false comparison of human height versus orca length.
And by the way, I said a box with the lid off, so your mention of a 3'x3'x3' is incorrect. It's hard to believe how my off-the-cuff suggestion of 3'x3' versus your "calculated" 13'x13' discredits my point in any way. And I left something off, because the orcas experience strong chemicals in the water, so the human box would need a gas of some sort constantly irritating the skin and eyes.
So yes, it is bikeshedding, because here we are.
> Mixing up Miami Seaquarium in a discussion about SeaWorld is confused. The two environments are totally incomparable.
I'm not confused about anything or mixing anything up. I genuinely have no idea what you're referring to or even getting at. Also, you do know that SeaWorld loans and sells orcas to places that often have far worse conditions than SeaWorld's already deplorable conditions, right?
I don't know what you're getting at in your last comment at all. Orcas weigh several tons. And an orca intentionally stranding isn't trying to commit suicide by suffocation. I didn't even say so. Orcas die from stranding due to their immense weight affecting their internal organs.
I have no idea how one can do any research into the lives orcas live in captivity and feel anything remotely close to okay with it.
> qualitative example, not something that can be directly compared enough to calculate some exact number
> like putting a human in a small 3'x3' box
Good thing you provided a number then? If you want to make a qualitative example, say "it would be like if a human lived in a heated swimming pool for the rest of its life" which is more accurate. Instead, you (and I think it's obvious you know what you're doing) throw out a number, then when you're demonstrated wrong, backpedal and say it was supposed to be qualitative.
> the orcas experience strong chemicals in the water
Do you think there aren't strong chemicals in the ocean? Salt is pretty corrosive. The ocean isn't exactly a homogeneous solution. There are a ton of pathogens as well, in fact most of them on earth live in the ocean.
> you do know that SeaWorld loans and sells orcas to places that often have far worse conditions than SeaWorld's
Yes, and that's a ringing endorsement for SeaWorld in my book. It means they are a leader in the care of these mammals. They actually have to participate in loan programs in order to be AZA accredited, which they are.
> I have no idea how one can do any research into the lives orcas live in captivity and feel anything remotely close to okay with it.
This is common among people who just haven't done much research on it. Marine mammal captivity is an important activity humans do in order to promote education, not to mention conservation (for species reintroduction or rehab in case of a catastrophe). It's a little unintuitive the same way that hunting (killing animals) supports wildlife preserves is unintuitive, but nevertheless there are good reasons we have these institutions and getting rid of them would be a huge mistake.
1. Then that should provide credence to their stances in your book. And yet they still supported SeaWorld?
2. That’s a statement that would hold true for any species and for conservation as a whole. In essence, denying the need for conservation in the first place. Ignorant of the daily catastrophe that’s happening in the wild.
The ocean is rapidly becoming uninhabitable for all kinds of life, orcas included. While we would previously expect a calf to live 60 years, that number is slowly dwindling and may accelerate in a downward direction. Contaminants like BPAs and BFRs are a big deal and already starting to have an effect in New Zealand on the orca population’s food supply.
I don’t know how you expect injured and rejected juveniles to survive outside of an artificial environment. Orcas are social animals, and they need a pod.
As far as stupid/evil, well believe what you like but I just believe in resilience. The same way we should have an arctic seed vault backing up seeds we should have a backup for different kinds of sea life.
Well, simple ratios. A human is roughly 6 feet tall, so a 3x3x3 box is a box with side length 1/2 of the height. The equivalent for an orca would be if you took an orca’s length, 26 feet, and had the enclosure be 13x13x13. The volume would be 2197 cubic feet, roughly 16,000 gallons that is.
Seaworld Orlando’s enclosure is approx 6 million gallons, so that statement is off by about 37,500%.
I'll agree it is confrontational, but I addressed it to people in general, so it's meant to be confrontational to the collective. And it's justifiably so because these beings continue to be held in captivity, bred in captivity, and even captured from the wild to be held in captivity. It's pure torture that people charge for visitors to come and laugh and gawk at.
A different wikipedia page (about another of the people Tilikum killed) describes the incident differently. I have not investigated all the citations to explain the difference:
Tilikum became an infamous whale after attacking and killing his trainer, forty-year-old SeaWorld staff member Dawn Brancheau. Tilikum grabbed her arm, scalped the woman, fractured her jaw and killed her by blunt force trauma, the result of which was a contentious and controversial legal case over the safety of working with orca whales and the ethics of keeping live whales and other marine mammals in captivity.
>The autopsy report said that Brancheau died from drowning and blunt force trauma. Her spinal cord was severed, and she had sustained fractures to her jawbone, ribs, and a cervical vertebra. Her scalp was completely torn off from her head, and her left elbow and left knee had been dislocated.
Tilikum weighed over 12,000 pounds. Orcas have bite forces apparently estimated to be around to be at least 20,000 psi (13 times that of a jaguar), can launch themselves tens of feet out of the water, can ram great whites and whales to disorient or knock them out, and more. It's honestly surprising the injuries weren't worse and showcases the orca was frustrated.
No one can ever just tell the facts about this case without some kind of slant. There's nothing we know that indicates this was an act of revenge. Tilikum was much more mistreated by the orcas he lived with than he was by any human, so if there was to be an act of revenge it would've likely been on another orca.
Or that because of their natural social structure, he wasn't as bothered by it as being trotted out to dance every five minutes while living in a glass jar
In HN tradition you've missed what I was trying to say, attention from other orca may be more welcome then idiots with legs, regardless of if it's negative.
You also make the dumb assumption that all creatures are here to perform a task, that isn't how real life species work
Not quite, I took your logic and simply showed that it leads to the wrong result.
I never said anyone is here to perform a task. That said, I am happier pressing buttons on a machine than I am just lying motionless. It doesn’t matter that the activity is artificial, doing something is by far preferable to doing nothing.
I’m glad you can make the statement “if you are happy you’re probably unhappy” because it really solidifies the fact that you think and speak in absurdisms.
If you think orcas are doing nothing at sea, how is that morally different from them doing nothing in a tank?
It’s a tradeoff. Humans are probably better/healthier if we are given freedom to roam the savanna, run miles in every direction. But if that’s the bar for allowing a human to exist, then there won’t be as many humans because the savanna can’t support 7 billion people, especially not with any kind of stability. A single blip in the food supply or weather would lead to a mass die-off.
That’s why we diversified and created towns and cities, artificial, restricted environments that allow life but are not as fun (or possible) to run around, but agriculture makes life a little more guaranteed and predictable. The same is true for orcas. The ocean is great, but it’s also dangerous and volatile. If we create a “town” for orcas it provides support for life at the exchange of freedom. This is hardly different from what we humans put ourselves through.
Google says that there are about a billion sharks in the world but only 50k orcas. Meanwhile there are only about 10 humans killed by sharks a year. So zero recorded humans killed by orcas isn't that surprising. I wouldn't personally volunteer to swim with them.
Edit: granted, I didn't mention that it's typically great white, tiger and bulls that are life threatening among sharks. So it isn't really a billion versus 50k. Regardless, there aren't really that many fatalities by sharks per year.
Latest estimation is that that are only 3500 great whites with more then 300+ recorded attacks, excluding other types of sharks.
Next to that Orcas frequently interact with humans, more than sharks. For instance as this article describes, they are quite active in the tiny mediterranean sea. Which some human even swim across (60 attempts per year).
Also they live close to the surface, they need to breath every 5-15 minutes. And just as sharks they enjoy Sea Lions, which sharks often confuse with humans.
3500 sounds low IMO when you look at some of the drone videos in SoCal of the people tracking these (mostly juveniles in SoCal).
Also they don't often confuse Sea Lions for humans, but it's still a good explanation for the few attacks that do occur. It's actually impressive how good they are at recognizing their prey.
Interestingly, orcas have a particular interest in great white sharks. Apparently they enjoy shark livers, and will hunt and kill great whites just to eat the liver and leave the rest of the carcass: https://www.iflscience.com/watch-a-great-white-shark-getting...
Orcas are savage, incredibly strong, smart, and capable pack hunters. Absolute apex predator of the sea and sharks don't stand a chance.
Shark livers are close to the size of the whole shark, and are full of fat, which the sharks rely on for flotation because they have no swim bladder like bony fish have.
To be clear, shark livers are so big because they have an extra job ours don't.
> Google says that there are about a billion sharks in the world but only 50k orcas. Meanwhile there are only about 10 humans killed by sharks a year. So zero recorded humans killed by orcas isn't that surprising. I wouldn't personally volunteer to swim with them.
Sharks are a group of taxonomical orders. Orcas are a species.
You wouldn't want to swim with them anyway, for the same reason you wouldn't want to run with a herd of stampeding cows.
Orcas are almost certainly several different species as well, but they remain officially classified as one until scientists agree on how to divide them up.
I thought orcas were traditionally divided into three types. There is no standard for what is or isn't a "species".
But it doesn't matter at all; the difference between the taxonomic level of "sharks" and the taxonomic level of "orcas" is unimaginably large regardless of what you want to call the levels.
Not at all. Without even mentioning plants and bacteria, wolves are canis lupus and dogs are canis familiaris. But interfertility is often a bigger problem between two types of dog than it is between a dog and a wolf.
I've noticed a real hesitancy to ascribe such complex reasoning to cetaceans. But these are thoughtful animals that in one instance led the creation of a complex and astonishingly cooperative co-hunting relationship with human whalers. They clearly understand humans are able to kill baleen whales even orcas can't handle (adult humpbacks, for example). It seems obvious that they also understand the potential consequences of competing with / preying upon a highly social alpha predator.
The higher number of shark attacks may also have to do with water conditions, which could lead a shark to mistakenly interpret a human as food or competition for food:
"A large number of (shark) bites occur when water conditions are poor"
- https://saveourseas.com/worldofsharks/why-do-sharks-bite-people
Well, there haven't been many deaths that we know of. However, the behavior of the orcas seems to be a learned behavior. Obviously they're doing this for a reason. Who knows, maybe this pod of whales has developed a taste?
There are a few ways I could see this happening. Perhaps they found a lone sailor, or maybe a small boat of migrants coming from Morocco made an easy target.
There was that recent BBC nature documentary that showed hunting behaviour by Orcas in Antarctica using self created waves to knock seals off ice floes and into the water that also had a "behind the scenes" part after that disturbingly seemed to suggest that the Orcas had a go at the same technique to try to knock the camera crew off their zodiac and into the water.
It's possible that they're capable of recognising intelligence in another species, like we are, so that may just be play... Or they think you might be a seal in a human costume
Not usually out of desire, dolphins are a little rapey but they think it's a game, orca are more intelligent than dolphins and do not attack unprovoked and even then have proved they will avoid human casualties
False. Killer whales have bitten surfers and generally attacked humans plenty, it’s just that in the wild there hasn’t been any (recorded) fatality. And you can anthropomorphize dolphins all you want but there’s no way to know what an animal’s intentions or understanding are.
Not only do they kill, they figured out if you flip a shark they'll pass out and they can nibble at leisure, that's a bit more intelligence than "idiots biting rudders" which seems to be the current theory sadly
There is at least one well-documented case of a pod of orcas understanding enough about people and boats for them to to initiate a mutually-beneficial and reciprocal understanding of how to cooperate in hunting whales.
Given this, I think it is conceivable that these orcas may have achieved some sort of understanding of fishing boats as competing with them for their food, and developed a hostility towards boats as a result.
IIRC, not all orca pods hunt whales or other marine mammals, and many are generally fish eaters. I would not be at all comfortable in a life raft or similar boat in the presence of orcas that do hunt seals or emperor penguins.
If orcas live for decades, have memories, and have language, then they're telling each other stories about us. The Southern Resident Killer Whales are down to 70+ beings. They've probably figured out by now that humans are the ones responsible for their food supply getting decimated. I suspect orcas everywhere are trying to figure out ways to communicate with us and are doing an amazing job.
They probably haven't accounted for human denial and human-centric science. These two things lead to scientists being like "Gee! I wonder why they're parading their dead babies and carrying them around? They must be grieving!"
As opposed to a slightly more realistic interpretation:
"They must be grieving and are trying to tell us 'See what you're doing to us?'"
By the way, the solution to their food supply issue is to breach the dams on the Snake River that are mostly only staying online to sustain the jobs of the people working on them. The salmon that spawns on the river saw its numbers plummet and have remained low ever since....for decades.
Yeah, looking for the simplest biological explanation, shortcirtuiting having to recognize life, is incredibly demeaning. Reminds me of the whole "babies/animals can't feel pain" thing. Sure, they act like they're hurt, but how do we know that's not just triggered responses to stimuli? FFS.
There are several subtypes. The most common are the transient, resident, and offshore orcas, but these are all located in the Pacific Northwest. (I believe there's a fourth, rarely observed one in this area, but I can't remember the name.) Several other subtypes exist, such as the rarely seen Type D pod in the Southern Ocean. If I recall correctly, the orcas attacking these boats are tuna specialists. Fish-eating orcas typically concentrate one a single or just a couple of species of fish, which explains why they're upset.
Orcas are highly intelligent, and it's my opinion that they know exactly what they're doing and are frustrated with the competition.
I think the running assumption should be that orcas are as intelligent as humans. Their brains are much larger and have more complex/dense folds than ours. They're also more socially bound than us, likely giving them a higher emotional intelligence.
Intelligence evolves in response to environmental pressures. Other than being mammalian, I doubt that orca and human intelligence can really be compared. Orcas don't have agriculture or industry. They just live naked in their environment and hunt. Their intelligence might be something like that of a pre-homo-sapien hunter tribe.
You are conflating intelligence with technology. Orcas live in the water and do not have hands. It is impossible for them to develop writing systems or agriculture due to their environment. If we put a human in water, assuming a human could survive in open water, we’d quickly realize the human is powerless to develop these things as well.
The modern day human brain is essentially identical to the earliest hunter-gatherer humans. Those groups did not have writing systems, industry, agriculture, etc., and yet their intelligence remains equal to ours. It is my suspicion, based upon my reading of orca behavior and biology, that such is the case with orcas. Even modern-day hunter-gatherer societies do not have writing systems or agriculture.
On a related note, I would even argue that our modern technology exposes the limits of human intelligence, particularly that of social and emotional intelligence.
Orcas appear to have quite high social and emotional intelligence in addition to their more raw intelligence of problem solving, teaching, and language.
The biology is rather clear. Their brains are very complex, even more so than ours when it comes to folds. The areas of their brains relating to social and emotional processes are bigger, relatively speaking, than the corresponding areas in human brains.
It is tempting to rate their intelligence lower because they don’t have tractors or rockets, but I think this is mistaken. Nearly every piece of research shows that they’re more intelligent and complex than we previously thought.
"Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much— the wheel, New York, wars and so on— while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man— for precisely the same reasons."
(Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish)
> Orcas don't have agriculture or industry.
> They just live naked in their environment and hunt.
That was also true of Homo Sapiens for quite a while. We have the same brains for thousands of years, which is adaptable enough for both hunger-gathering, as well as rocket science.
Orcas don't have hands and live underwater. That may put a damper on their industry.
Interestingly, there's almost no documentation of orcas attacking humans in the wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orca_attack . While there seem to be some cases of attacking boats, wikipedia lists only a single known instance of a human being bitten by a wild orca. It's actually rather surprising, considering they are an apex predator with a highly varied diet. Though it's said most attacks by sharks are a case of mistaken identity, and with better intelligence and echolocation an orca is far less likely to make that mistake.
Randall Munroe of the New York Times wrote about this recently in a column[1] comparing orcas and sharks. He quoted a marine biologist who attributed the rarity of attacks to infrequent encounters between humans and orcas. They don't tend to hang around places where people are swimming.
That's not really true. Orcas are one of the most widespread species and are almost always associated with coasts.
The reason for difference of attacks is biology and intelligence. Sharks are basically one big system of sensors, and they attack basically anything that triggers those sensors. Orcas have a much, much higher intelligence (on the level of humans, in my opinion), and so they probably see humans the same way we see sloths. That is, we're curious about them, but they would make for a nasty and rather pointless meal.
Orcas also have generational memory, so for certain pods, humans are probably known to them and they'd rather not directly engage.
In 1989 American researcher Bernd Würsig published an article about him having been attacked by a killer whale on a beach of Valdes Peninsula. A single individual, possibly as big as 9 metres (30 ft), beached towards him while he was watching sea lions about 200 metres (650 ft) from him in hope to take a photograph of a killer whale hunt. Dr Würsig ran up the beach after the animal missed him by about 1 metre. He speculated that the whale might have mistaken him for a pinniped.[19]
They actually leave lots of evidence. A transient eating a seal is messy business and there are lots of seal bits and chunks left over. Eva Saulitis describes the aftermath in several cases in her book (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/219235/into-great-s...). IIRC, fishing the evidence out of the water is one of the primary ways they study killer whale diets.
I wonder if somewhere someone implemented those codes in a database and didn’t know about data normalization.
I’m imagining a boolean column somewhere dedicated to tracking whether every patient has been attacked by an orca or not. It’s fun to imagine things sometimes
> Last month, five people had to be rescued after a pod of orcas attacked and sank their sailboat off the coast of Portugal. As the boat took on water, they deployed a life raft and were picked up by a nearby fishing vessel, writes Raffaella Ciccarelli for 9News.
> ...
> Conservationists urge the public not to view these incidents as malicious. "They are not attacks, they are interactions, that is, killer whales detect a foreign object that enters their lives and respond to its presence, but not in an aggressive way,” Alfredo López of Iberian Orca, a conservation group, tells Newsweek’s Robyn White.
Not that I necessarily blame the orcas here, but this framing is so bizarre and out of touch.
"Yes, they destroyed the boat and the people had to be rescued, but it's not aggressive."
When organizations use weasel words and spaghetti logic like this, they signal that they're not interested in arguing in good faith, and people start dismissing them out of hand.
> "Yes, they destroyed the boat and the people had to be rescued, but it's not aggressive."
> When organizations use weasel words and spaghetti logic like this, they signal that they're not interested in arguing in good faith
There are a few relevant questions in a scenario like this:
1. Was the attack intentional?
2. Was causing harm/destruction a goal of the attack?
3. Orcas are predators. Were they attempting to eat anyone?
I would interpret "not in an aggressive way" as drawing a line between questions (1) and (2), and that's certainly an important distinction to draw. It's also possible to draw a line between (2) and (3), which wouldn't match well with the ordinary use of the word "aggressive", but which is still important and is suggested by the context.
Dogs understand attacking property -- especially property obviously being used by a human -- and orcas are considerably smarter than dogs. I believe they've been shown to cooperate with humans in hunting before, and that without the sort of socialization dogs get and without the artificial selection for human sociability dogs have undergone.
Sure, they weren't trying to eat anyone, and I don't believe orcas basically ever actually try to kill humans...but the very fact that they don't further underlines how smart they are, so yeah they knew what they were doing.
> Dogs understand attacking property -- especially property obviously being used by a human -- and orcas are considerably smarter than dogs.
The concepts an animal understands are not particularly related to the animal's intelligence. Human property is a major part of the world of dogs, and not at all a part of the world of orcas.
> I believe they've been shown to cooperate with humans in hunting before
Case in point. Orcas in the wild are pack hunters. This is an easy adjustment for them to make.
I have to imagine there's a reason for this behavior. The researchers have some very infantile conclusions as to why: maybe they like rudders! Maybe it's just a fad! Seems a bit disingenuous given our understanding of how smart these animals are.
Alternatively, they're doing this for a specific reason. Perhaps noise pollution, food scarcity, just general annoyance with the boats, etc.
“Fads” imply sophisticated social interactions that are generally associated with near-human levels (or at least likeness) of intelligence. I interpret that conclusion as being supportive of the idea that these are incredibly intelligent animals, not the opposite.
When it comes to other mammals, there's this Human Supremacist mindset that since we can't converse with them, they are incapable of intent / complex thought / problem solving activities.
Humans have been piloting boats across the Atlantic for around 800 years (beginning with Greenland), and the great cod collapse happened on the quincentennial of Columbus's voyage. Each of your explanations has a "why now?" caveat. Fads fit in the gap, unless they've recently developed weapons.
Increasing water temp, climate change, food scarcity, environmental pollution, desperation, habitat loss, new audible or physical disturbances caused by these boats. I mean, there's probably 100 different reasons you could think of for why now.
"Fads" answer nothing aside from simply removing the need for further explanation. Why are they doing that? I don't know, they're bored! It's a fad. Great research.
Orcas enjoy pinning whales and entering the mouth to remove the tongue, even if they do not eat the rest. Perhaps rudders and boat undersides with similar shapes inspire the same play instinct.
> Or, maybe this is just a new “fad” for juvenile orcas that could go out of fashion as they grow up, Jared Towers, director of Canadian research organization Bay Cetology, tells NPR. In the 1990s, scientists observed another strange orca trend, but it has since faded away.
> "They'd kill fish and just swim around with this fish on their head," Towers tells NPR. "We just don't see that anymore.”
If I didn't know any better, it sounds like the Orcas discovered TikTok long before we did.
Edit:
It's a joke y'all. I find the trends in TikTok both hilarious and scary. Maybe Orca parents do too /s
This happened to my father’s boat a few weeks ago. He says four other boats were attacked on the same day but it was only recorded as a single incident — which he thinks is a conspiracy by the authorities so sailors aren’t scared off.
He says it is known that the problem is caused by an adult female, who has some “teenagers” who either take part or hang around observing.
His proposed solution is a 50 cal riffle to the brain of the adult female. IDK
>His proposed solution is a 50 cal riffle to the brain of the adult female. IDK
One of the most fascinating episodes of mythbusters I've ever seen was watching what happens to bullets (even up to .50 cal IIRC) when they hit water. They disintegrate within like 1m.
Disclaimer: I vehemently disagree with the idea of shooting the killer whales.
That episode they were shooting directly into a swimming pool, and I think the close-to-max velocity of the bullet caused them to disintegrate.
Or in other words, I wouldn’t assume that bullets impacting water at lower velocities would behave the same.
Fwiw, I don’t remember them using a 50 cal. The amount of energy in a 50BMG compared to even a 30 cal round is ridiculously huge, and IMO would have risked damaging the pool.
May not have to wait so long. A failed rudder deep in international waters can easily kill someone. And a broken rudder in a busy shipping channel can even easier kill someone.
An attack on someone's rudder while offshore is 100% an attack on their life, and arguably justifies lethal self defense.
Well he doesn’t have a 50cal on his boat and nor do any other dingy sailors so best they can do is radio for help. I’m sure it will all blow over once the orcas get bored. Either that or they’ll escalate to eating people
If orca associate humans with taking their food, killing whales (eg: Faroe Islands), and polluting their habitat it's not surprising for them to instinctively react against this threat.
Exactly, I don't believe one bit that they're "attracted to the pressure differential of the prop." I've swam in the ocean and boats are extremely noisy and annoying underwater. The Orcas fully understand that the boats are linked to the changes in the ocean.
To the downvote: I'm sure you've heard a drone buzzing above your head and getting nervous. A boat propeller does the same thing.
Granted, this was a lonely little fellow. But, he knew perfectly well what he was doing and repeatedly approached boats, despite the noise. He died after colliding with a tugboat prop.
Orca will kill other whales simply to eat the tongue. The idea they would be offended by Faroese hunting and killing other species of whales... seems unlikely. Competition seems like better motivation.
Orcas need a better marketing team. Whoever pushed the "killer whale" name over something nicer such as "sea pandas" or "penguin whale" was not thinking long term.
Pica is the eating or craving of things that are not food. It can be a disorder in itself or a sign of other cultural or medical phenomena. The ingested or craved substance may be biological, natural or manmade. The term was drawn directly from the medieval Latin word for magpie, a bird subject to much folklore regarding its opportunistic feeding behaviors.
Tuna fish migrant populations plummeted to only a 13% of its former numbers. Mediterranean seals vanished from Spain some decades ago also.
So orcas are trying to get the attention from humans, because they know that humans have tuna. And they do strange things because they also know that humans trow dead fishes discarded in nets to the sea.
I wonder if something about the rudders themselves has changed?
For example maybe the makers of paints or sealants used on wooden rudders changed formulations due to pandemic supply chain issues or for environmental or regulatory reasons, and now they include something that smells like food to the Orcas.
Orcas are not that dumb, and the orcas in this area specialize in tuna. They don't eat other things, and they aren't going to suddenly mistakenly identify a rudder as something to eat.
> Or, maybe this is just a new “fad” for juvenile orcas that could go out of fashion as they grow up, Jared Towers, director of Canadian research organization Bay Cetology, tells NPR. In the 1990s, scientists observed another strange orca trend, but it has since faded away.
Outhouse tipping for adolescent Orcas?
(OK, so maybe you have to have grown up in a rural area, 50 years ago to know that tipping over the small outdoor toilets called outhouses was a favorite low key vandalism for bored adolescent males, but ...)
Issue is that its "free" as in zero cost for fishing boats to fish all the fish in the ocean. So fishing has over fished the fish in the oceans. Classic tragedy of the commons of a resource fish which has no price for the extractor.
Orcas has no food so they knock out fishing boats.
I agree that it’s textbook tragedy of the commons. It might appear that orcas are trying to outcompete with fishing boats, but this sounds like personification or an anthropomorphism of whales.
I figured it along the lines of diminished habitat leading to attacks on a perceived invader, which just so happens to be far worse than any natural predator. It might also take additional experimentation/observation to see if some orcas are predisposed to aggressive behavior when perpetually hungry, but this seems to me quite a natural impulse to starvation. In any case, it will lead to evolutionary adaptation … or extinction.
I don't know. It looks like Atlantic Cod aren't bouncing back[0], and neither are alewife, rainbow smelt, bloater and others in the Georgian Bay[1]. Meanwhile, apparently, Pacific Sardine have collapsed from 1.8M to 0.2M in the last 20 years[3]. These data paint a grim picture.
It jumped 4 times high out of the water, each time landing within a few feet of my boat, staring at me the whole time it was in the air. Crazily rocked my small sailboat but it didn't take in any water.
> "They'd kill fish and just swim around with this fish on their head," Towers tells NPR. "We just don't see that anymore.”
Imagining the behavioral / fashion trends of Orcas over time is really fascinating :D