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Orca rams into yacht near Scotland, suggesting the behavior may be spreading

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Orca rams into yacht near Scotland, suggesting the behavior may be spreading

#81

Post by mcpackieh »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #74
mcpackieh wrote: post #53

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 in…

Some argue they are selective eaters and generally eat what they are thought by their pod while growing up.

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.

Re: Orca rams into yacht near Scotland, suggesting the behavior may be spreading

#83

Post by koheripbal »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #79
OmarShehata wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are videos of it, and lots of people have seen it, not sure how much more proof you need: > 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…

> 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 a dishonest comment.

No one has dressed up and walked in front of a camera as ball lightning

Re: Orca rams into yacht near Scotland, suggesting the behavior may be spreading

#84

Post by atdrummond »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #65
anigbrowl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

something of a coincidence 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.wiki…

That link says: “Owing to the lack of reproducible data, the existence of ball lightning as a distinct physical phenomenon remains unproven”

We had ball lightning blow a painting off of our wall in front of 30-odd people at Thanksgiving.

It’s possible it was a mass delusion or a ghost but both of those strike me as less likely.

Re: Orca rams into yacht near Scotland, suggesting the behavior may be spreading

#85

Post by atdrummond »

koheripbal wrote: post #83
hombre_fatal wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a dishonest comment. No one has dressed up and walked in front of a camera as ball lightning

Not yet they haven’t.

Re: Orca rams into yacht near Scotland, suggesting the behavior may be spreading

#86

Post by atdrummond »

mcpackieh wrote: post #71
ceejayoz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are very intelligent mammals, they should be curious about how we taste. Maybe they're intelligent enough to recognize our intelligence, and don't want to attack other intelligent beings?

Maybe, but they don't seem to have much pity/respect for other intelligent animals. Particularly, they devour baby whales of other species.

We kill plenty of our own babies and there’s relatively little outrage about this proportionally.

I’m not sure that ethics and intelligence correlate nearly as well as we would like to think.

Re: Orca rams into yacht near Scotland, suggesting the behavior may be spreading

#87

Post by j-bos »

gcanyon wrote: post #62

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou... Old Tom, one of the most helpful orcas, die…

Phenomenal history, thanks for sharing.

Re: Orca rams into yacht near Scotland, suggesting the behavior may be spreading

#88

Post by platz »

_fat_santa wrote: post #42
swid wrote: post #15

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…

> orcas are sort of like rowdy teenagers participating in a fad That sounds more amazing to me than the theory of the traumatic event, an Ocra equivalent to a TikTok trend.

crows are similar

Re: Orca rams into yacht near Scotland, suggesting the behavior may be spreading

#89

Post by mcpackieh »

atdrummond wrote: post #86
mcpackieh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but they don't seem to have much pity/respect for other intelligent animals. Particularly, they devour baby whales of other species.

We kill plenty of our own babies and there’s relatively little outrage about this proportionally. I’m not sure that ethics and intelligence correlate nearly as well as we would like to think.

Okay but the supposition I'm responding to is that orcas are too ethical to eat humans. The capacity for humans to behave unethically isn't disputed.

Re: Orca rams into yacht near Scotland, suggesting the behavior may be spreading

#90

Post by fasthands9 »

Scarblac wrote: post #69
fasthands9 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. There is now an Orca Reporting form: https://www.theca.org.uk/orcas/…

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?

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