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Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries

science.org

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Re: Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries

#11

Post by nerdsniper »

rixed wrote: post #8

I find the final question about human intervention fascinating. The scientists aren’t recommending intervention, even if the perpetrators tend to be the same few individuals. “We don’t know how natural it is,” says Ursula Siebert, a veterinary pathologist specializing in wildlife population health at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover who was not involved with the work. “It can definitely be hard to watch…

The mature view is that it boils down to the “Chesterton’s Fence” concept. Rather than “humans bad, nature good”, we just don’t know if the result of intervention might be an unfit population / ecosystem.

The result of this, of course, is that we tend to intervene a lot when humans are affected (massive industrial footprints, screw-worms, etc) and a lot less when it’s irrelevant to human welfare. We are, by nature, biased towards the anthropic.

Re: Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries

#13

Post by oaiey »

rixed wrote: post #8

I find the final question about human intervention fascinating. The scientists aren’t recommending intervention, even if the perpetrators tend to be the same few individuals. “We don’t know how natural it is,” says Ursula Siebert, a veterinary pathologist specializing in wildlife population health at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover who was not involved with the work. “It can definitely be hard to watch…

I always read this as: when something is doomed by itself, it is the normal unaltered way of things. Let it flow.

Re: Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries

#15

Post by TimByte »

delichon wrote: post #3

I once lived in an apartment in Colorado with a balcony overlooking a pond. Once a grebe was paddling around in it followed by four chicks. It was a great image for the Colorado Tourism Office. Then mamma grebe swam back and swallowed the fourth chick whole, and the smaller family paddled away. Brood reduction isn't common in grebes, but I saw it anyway, and thought maybe I didn't get the straight dope from Disney mo…

Yeah, nature has a way of very quickly correcting the version of itself we picked up from cartoons

Re: Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries

#16

Post by TimByte »

rixed wrote: post #8

I find the final question about human intervention fascinating. The scientists aren’t recommending intervention, even if the perpetrators tend to be the same few individuals. “We don’t know how natural it is,” says Ursula Siebert, a veterinary pathologist specializing in wildlife population health at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover who was not involved with the work. “It can definitely be hard to watch…

I think it's less "nature knows better" and more "we usually don't know enough"

Re: Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries

#17

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

delichon wrote: post #3

I once lived in an apartment in Colorado with a balcony overlooking a pond. Once a grebe was paddling around in it followed by four chicks. It was a great image for the Colorado Tourism Office. Then mamma grebe swam back and swallowed the fourth chick whole, and the smaller family paddled away. Brood reduction isn't common in grebes, but I saw it anyway, and thought maybe I didn't get the straight dope from Disney mo…

When I was in college I worked in a lab where part of my job was killing rats (I actually had a real moral problem that the general term used for the killing of lab animals at this time was "sacrificing", e.g. "I sac'ed that litter of rats yesterday", because it felt like a way to lessen ones natural emotional guilt at the task. Not sure if that term is still used today.) I really had a moral quandary in what I did, even moreso because I felt a visceral disgust (like I actually threw up a bit) the first time I had to kill a rat and then cut off its head with a pair of scissors, but after I got used to it I had no problem with it - I came to understand how people can get used to doing things they originally found morally reprehensible, and it scared me about myself.

Anyway, I always found my guilt was assuaged at least a little bit if a mama rat would eat one of the babies by herself. "Hey, I'm no worse than the mom!" I'd say to myself. Then I felt a lot worse when I came to understand that moms tend to eat their babies when under high stress or when they think a baby is sick, which was probably a result of living in the lab in the first place.

Re: Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries

#18

Post by steve_adams_86 »

btilly wrote: post #12

I am curious why the killers didn't eat more. Is this just the choicest bits - another pup is easy to find?

As I understood it, the blubber is being eaten and the rest is left. The sheer number of carcasses makes me wonder if this blubber is relatively easy to extract using this method, so they kind of rove through the herd and pick the low hanging fruit, so to speak

Re: Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries

#19

Post by operatingthetan »

rixed wrote: post #8

I find the final question about human intervention fascinating. The scientists aren’t recommending intervention, even if the perpetrators tend to be the same few individuals. “We don’t know how natural it is,” says Ursula Siebert, a veterinary pathologist specializing in wildlife population health at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover who was not involved with the work. “It can definitely be hard to watch…

It kinda seems like they have a serial-killer seal in the population.

Re: Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries

#20

Post by nomilk »

> The males may be seeking added nutrients in high-calorie blubber to boost their mating value during the breeding season, a time when bulls usually fast, Langley speculates.

Wonder if the male killer is of the same bloodline? Lions often opportunistically kill offspring of other males to reduce competition for their own offspring and to bring females into estrous.

EDIT: FWIW I asked claude and it says

> Gray seals have a promiscuous, harem-based mating system, but paternity is diffuse and males don't guard specific females long-term the way lions do. A bull has little way of "knowing" which pups are his rivals' offspring vs. his own.

So seems unlikely (according to claude).

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