https://nitter.1d4.us/CriminalUnionFW/status/1668724312830799872
People are talking about these things as a joke, but cetacean intelligence is a genuine discussion in biology.
These animals have common stakes, common struggle and they recognize that. They are organizing to survive in a world in crisis, just like we are.
When I call toothed whales comrades I mean it.
And just like always humans are planning to shoot them and ignore the problems causing it
Totally uncritical support if Green Peace decided to turn out to protect the Orcas.
Posadism has been too limited in its scope! All marine mammals have revolutionary potential!
we need a new age of wind powered vessels
not only would it drastically cut back on fossil fuel use, it would eliminate noise pollution from motorized vessels - which hurts whales and dolphins, giving them headaches.
yes, it will slow down global trade. that's something we will have to learn to live with
There's 50 to 60,000 cargo ships. Those ships contribute about 3% of global CO2 emissions but each ship individually emits as much sulfur dioxide as 50 million cars
A single sunk cargo ship represents destroying 50 million cars...
That's some serious agitation material.
i don't think you can assume something like that would simply not be replaced. how much extra would the rest of the fleet burn to cover the loss? how many extra air freight flights from companies needing their widgets on time?
Not that we'd ever find out from the very fucked language experiments people have done on marine mammals in the past, but I wonder if it might actually be possible to communicate mutually intelligibly with them. I'm neither a linguist nor a marine biologist, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it'd seem to me this level of organization would require some form of language to exist. Is it possible to decipher it with a human brain given enough study? I'd assume whatever the answer to that question is, it'd say a lot about the possibility of communication with aliens as well.
It's very likely that they're not organizing a revolution and are hanging out for some other reason. The Orcas might even be hunting the other whales. Hell, the other whales might be grouping up as a defense against the Orcas. Orcas around the world tend to be divided in to populations that primarily hunt fish, cephalpods, and sometimes small mammals, and populations that primarily hunt whales and other larger marine mammals
The "Killer" in Killer Whale is a very apt description. They are the uncontested masters of the sea. The only animals that stand a chance against a pod of killer whales are humans. They routinely hunt and destroy Great White Sharks that stray in to their territory and sharks have been recorded fleeing from regions occupied by Orcas. Orcas are known to prey on almost all other marine mammals from small seals to blue whales.
That said, we really shouldn't fuck with Orcas. They're very smart, they can pass knowledge between individuals and generations and occaisionally between pods, and if the pods start deciding to do something about us they could kill a lot of people before the inevitable retaliation. Orcas have never been recorded having a deadly interaction in humans except in circumstances where they were enslaved in aquatic parks, but I feel like that accordance of respect could be rescinded very quickly.
I bet you marine biologists in the region could tell you which pods these are and whether they're resident (mostly feed on fish and other small animals) or transient (mostly feed on marine mammals including whales) pods.
I do think the world's Orcas must have some kind of special awareness of humans. They're really smart, and I'm not aware of any other large predator that has never been recorded preying on humans, even incidentally or under exceptional circumstances. The simple fact that there has never been a verified fatal Orca attack seems like it must mean something, because if they wanted to they could take humans with no trouble at all.
too bad if they could make tools to destroy us, they would become us
It's not impossible, but given that Orcas eat most of those species pretty ruthlessly I'd say it's unlikely. But who knows, maybe it's a fish eating resident pod and not a mammal eating transient pod, and whales aren't racist?
Whales can actually tell if it's a fish eating or mammal eating pod and treat them accordingly. Off the coast of Newfoundland, there's both mammal-hunting pods which are universally shunned by other cetaceans there and fish-eating pods that have specialized in hunting cooperatively with humpback whales using the technique of bubble-netting herring swarms. Cetaceans like narwals that would be the prey of the mammal-eating pods do not flee these orcas. Orca pods both settle on one lifelong hunting strategy that they almost never change and each pod has an individual accent, so a sufficiently intelligent species can identify if they're a threat if they are locals by listening to them. Given how fine cetacean hearing is, they probably know who they're dealing with long before the orcas themselves can be "seen" because they are within effective sonar reach.
Interspecies cooperative hunting is also known from Pesudorca crassidens, who often forms pods of hundreds or thousands of individuals with other dolphin species such as spinner dolphins. They're also know to regularly have both gay and straight sexual relationships with these. :pseudorca:
Full and uncritical support to and solidarity with my posadist comrades.
I was going to make a joke about how if this was Reddit we'd have people in the comments complaining about the title of the post. Imagine my horror when yours is the first post I see
