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Free time, curiosity and playfulness has led to young orcas bumping boats

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Re: Free time, curiosity and playfulness has led to young orcas bumping boats

#31

Post by robertlagrant »

politelemon wrote: post #23
pavlov wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe orcas can live as long as humans. So there's a bunch of middle-aged orcas out there who sometimes go: "Remember when we all wore fish hats after Jeannie got one? Man, that was crazy... Do you think a dead salmon would look good on me still?"

The important thing was that I had a salmon on my head, which was the style at the time. They didn't have any pink salmons, because of the humans. The only thing you could get was those decaying yellow ones...

It's funny - I hung on to my dead trout, which is basically the same thing. These things go in cycles!

Re: Free time, curiosity and playfulness has led to young orcas bumping boats

#34

Post by HumblyTossed »

317070 wrote: post #22
me_me_me wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the go after the sail boats or is it just motorboats. The propellers are quite loud under the water, I wonder if they are maybe annoyed by the noise and learnt attacking those vessels makes the noise go away

Among the sailing cruisers, it's become clear this is not a factor. Sailing vessels have been attacked with their propellors on brake, with their props disengaged or with props running. In general, marine mammals don't mind the sound of engines (even though I do!) We have had pods of dolphins swimming along and playing around our boat in all configurations. I once turned off the engine when the dolphins came around,…

Dolphins like to wake surf, so yeah, they left to go find another boat.

Re: Free time, curiosity and playfulness has led to young orcas bumping boats

#35

Post by LtWorf »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #32
ironmagma wrote: post #10

> it's not their anticapitalist 'eat the rich' agenda This seems epistemologically quite dubious. How would we know?

We gave some dolphins a few fish and they told us.

I wouldn't trust class traitors.

Re: Free time, curiosity and playfulness has led to young orcas bumping boats

#37

Post by sandworm101 »

>> "In an ideal world, there would be a simple strategy for mariners to follow when killer whales interact, which would avoid vessel damage and harm to the whales. Unfortunately, there appears to be no such panacea," the authors of the study wrote.

No. There is an easy answer. Stop sailing your toys through that bit of ocean. This is not an issue for commercial craft. This is about large sailboats, which are universally toys of the rich. Just call this part of the ocean a no-go area for a few years and the orca will forget about this game. If this was a population of eagles that was ripping apart ultralight aircraft, the FAA would slap a NOTAM on the area and that would be the end of the issue.

Re: Free time, curiosity and playfulness has led to young orcas bumping boats

#38

Post by krisoft »

The big issue is that we can't communicate to the orcas that this is not ok. We could very easily destroy them, but of course nobody wants to do that.

You could try to spritz them with a water bottle but I suspect they wouldn't notice. Same with the rolled up newspaper trick. It would just dissolve in the water.

I'm very worried about these orcas ever since I heard about them. It is probably fun for them what they are doing but the longer they are at it the more likely is that some vigilante decides to stop them. And given the lack of good soft options that lesson will be probably a violent one.

They don't even know how scary the bear is they are poking on the regular. Hope they will go bored of it before they get hurt.

Re: Free time, curiosity and playfulness has led to young orcas bumping boats

#39

Post by ginko »

Historically orcas usually didn't mess with boats or even assisted whalers in hunts.

I wonder if this was a cultural memory of the orcas about sailors (whalers at least) retaliating quite fiercely in the few instances they were being messed with and that's fading away now.

Re: Free time, curiosity and playfulness has led to young orcas bumping boats

#40

Post by dsizzle »

lioeters wrote: post #7

> The report reveals that a combination of free time, curiosity and natural playfulness has led to young orcas adopting this 'trend' of boat-bumping.. > Most of the 15 were male juveniles and teens..suggesting that what started as playful head-bumping on boat rudders has escalated as the animals have grown larger..And no orca over the age of 25 – when males are fully grown – has been seen participating in the tomfool…

Idle fins are the devil's workshop!
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