[1] https://elpais.com/espana/2020-08-07/se-les-acabo-el-agua-ti... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32337725
That would give them plenty of opportunity to learn the connection between boats and food.
However, the article notes that they do not attack the people, but the boats: “In these and all other known cases, the mammals ignored the humans who took to life rafts; it was the boats that attracted their ire.”
The second half of the article is far more revealing, it details the state of the relationship between fishing, tourism and orcas in the Straits of Gibraltar - painting a particularly stark picture of the impact humans have had on obliterating their primary food source and dominating that area with noisy boats, their dwindling population and direct harm caused by fishing nets and hooks as they struggle to survive by picking fish from the nets instead.
If accurate it seems far more likely any animal capable of drawing a relationships between boats and other events would make the reverse relationship you are suggesting (boats steal all their food, hurt them directly, kill their young)... If I were an Orca I'd find it hard to believe I wouldn't be knocking over smaller boats out of desperation as their local population has almost vanished (30 adults last estimate).
Perhaps I'm wrong and their ability to reason on larger scales of time and space are not sufficient, but i'm pretty sure they are smart enough to know a boat is not edible - shaking humans off for food seems like a stretch but possible given they are pretty much starving, i will give you that.
They work in teams in a truly impressive manner. They teach their young the skills of their pods.
If I were to bet orcas are second smartest species on this planet.
the sailboats have a streamlined "displacement" underwater body which naturally - due to optimizing for the same hydrodynamic laws - resembles large mammal body. With the stressed ecosystem - in particular lack of food to the extent threatening the very survival - attacking of your perceived competitor becomes the logical last available option.
[…]
But many conservationists suspect some fishermen retaliate violently”
I think it’s at least equally likely they learned that boats of a certain size in the neighborhood of tuna can attack their family, and do this to protect it.
> "I’ve seen them look at boats hauling fish. I think they know that humans are somehow related to the scarcity of food"
If they are really that smart, they would be smart enough to figure out humans are made of food too, right? Some orca at some point in time would've realized it and eaten a human, yet that hasn't happened.
Hear me out: what if they don't kill us out of self preservation? They see the fishing boats, the harpoons. They even see the gigantic war ships, and are probably smart enough to realize that those are linked. Would we attract the ire of a species that is much more advanced than ours if it was just harvesting resources? Not until we're almost dead from starvation.
I doubt attacking humans would be good for orcas in the long run, and perhaps their intellect allows them to generally understand this while sharks don't. (Orcas don't even nibble on humans out of curiosity, so how would they know we don't taste delicious? In this regard sharks seem more curious than orcas, which is seems strange since they're otherwise very curious animals.)
There are no known attacks on humans, that doesn't mean that is hasn't happened. Orcas are generally not hunting where humans swim, and they aren't going to capsize a freighter. Plus there's better food in the water, and it's more frequent. An orca, or a family of orcas that would specialize on hunting humans would starve. We don't swim in the open sea a lot, they don't walk through towns a lot.
I believe you're over-estimating their intelligence.
> I believe you're over-estimating their intelligence.
One of my favourite orca stories is the killers of Eden[0]. The wiki page is short and worth a read, but to summarize: a pod of whales learns to herd whales into a bay and alert humans to them. Humans harpoon them and the pod helps drag them back by pulling on the ropes. The carcass is left overnight for the pod, that eats its lips and tongue. Afterwards, the humans haul it back.
Why would the orcas alert the humans unless they realized that the humans were responsible for the harpooning? Furthermore, just the act of slapping the river with water to attract attention is already quite advanced. And why did they only eat part of the whale (and always the same part)? Why did they never eat the humans?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...
I don't believe they're "if you eat that guy over there, the navy will come and hunt us down" smart though.
Since manual whaling hasn't happened for quite a while, they'd need to communicate abstract concepts to their offspring to keep the memory alive. It's one thing to demonstrate to them how to synchronize dives to create a wave and flush a seal off of an ice sheet, it's quite another to explain the process of humans hunting them with ships and harpoons and indicating that humanity's technology has progressed.
Think about how you feel approaching a very large animal, like a horse you don't know. You don't need to know how or even if it can hurt you, but it's worth being careful. If you know the animal has sharp points (like a large dog), even more so. I think sparrows avoid cars by similar logic.
I really think non-verbal, subconscious intelligence is capable of a lot more abstraction than people think. We need language to describe it, but not to do it. "Threat" is an abstraction that lots of simple animals handle just fine. It's not so much that we need to give animals more credit than that we give ourselves too much. Our actual motivations are usually much simpler than the stories we tell ourselves.
What's really interesting here is the problem of just a "naive threat estimation", which usually is always just estimating the purely mechanical danger the body of a foe could pose. We have a healthy respect for large animals like horses and cattle that could crush us. We've got an open fear of predators with obvious sharp teeth and such (wolves, big cats, crocodilians). But bugs? Bugs are really weird because they're not mechanically dangerous, and as, say, a child, sizing them up, there's no sensible reason to be scared.
I find it really interesting how - even without necessarily understanding that they've got poison, we as a species do a really good job of being scared of "things that aren't visually obvious threats" like this - especially in kids, who really struggle to "get it" when it comes to what's actually dangerous about, say, a spider or a jellyfish.
I think you really hit on something there - I think a little bit of it is actually a built-in instinctual fear, but there's also a huge part that's an imitative fear kids pick up from anything that the body language of a parent conveys as dangerous.
See, something insects don't get.
The increasing migration across the Mediterranean, often in overcrowded, unseaworthy boats, raises the possibility that maybe a pod of orcas has come across a boat that is sinking, putting seal-sized, slow-moving creatures into the water...
Further, orcas are culturally separated into many groups, often called ecotypes. Although some of these ecotypes may eventually be separated into separate species, they are currently all the same species. They are able to eat whatever food and they are able to interbreed, except that they don't. These are cultural separations that orcas have created, and they are not biological.
So, certain ecotypes are fish eaters, and very particular fish eaters at that. The Southern Resident orcas in the Pacific Northwest only eat a specific type of salmon. That salmon is in major decline, and thus the orcas that eat them are in decline and for various other reasons as well such as being hunted in the 70s for capture to serve as entertainment. As far as I know, it is unknown why these orcas do not switch their food source. From what I read, these orcas performing the attacks are tuna eating orcas, so they are again fish specialists. They are likely experiencing the same threats to their food source as well.
Other ecotypes, like those that you mentioned about seals, have more diverse diets typically revolving around mammals. In the Pacific Northwest, the Southern Resident (the salmon eaters) and Transients (the mammal eaters) share the same waters but do not eat each others' foods. Since the transients have more diverse sources that are not struggling, they are not struggling like the fish eating ecotypes.
Thus, it's highly unlikely for fish eating orcas to suddenly want to eat orcas. There's multiple reasons. There is the cultural reasons, and there are also the reasons as humans are terrible meals. My own personal suspicions are that orcas are much closer to human level intelligence than anyone recognizes, and so my personal guess would be that these attacks are one of stress and aggression to prevent other animals stealing their food. It is also possible they've been able to reclaim tuna this way as well.
There are stories of orcas in the early 20th century helping whalers, but the way I read it, it was actually the orcas training the humans to help them capture and kill the whales. Orcas are intelligent enough that they understand how things work.
There is footage of this technique in BBC’s Frozen Planet, if anyone is curious to see it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRu3LGceAg
It doesn't seem as full effort as the normal ones, so they could have been training or experimenting, both of which they are known to do. They could have been play and giving a little scare as well.
Orcas had many chances to kill and eat humans but they never did it. They don't see us as food. Probably their intelligence makes us interesting to them. And they don't have problems getting food from any source they want, so I'd take hunger out of the equation.
«The orcas return to this noisy, polluted stretch of water for one reason – to feed. They specialise in hunting bluefin tuna, also highly prized by humans. The near collapse of bluefin tuna between 2005 and 2010 “has led this orca population to the very edge, with about 30 adults left”, says Pauline Gauffier, who has studied them.»
Well, I was hoping for adventure stories, but the book ended up being a dry and technical description of incidents. Yet, still interesting. One horror story I recall was of Orcas harassing an Inuit family in their canoe. And them having to throw one of their kids overboard to get away.
No idea idea if the stories in the book were real or made up. But just based on the dry and technical descriptions, part of me has always suspected they might have been real.
He co-operated with 3 generations of a human whaling family before he died a natural death.
His skeleton remains on display in the local museum to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tom_(killer_whale)
edit: longer story about him;
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-lege...
Hmmm. "If you don't behave, we'll give you to the Orcas..." sounds like the kind of thing some pissed off parents would tell their kids.
The Sea World orca Tilikum killed three people, though not for eating.
If you see blackfish take in mind that must not be seen as an honest bona-fide documentary. Is entertaining if you understand what it really is. A fictionary monster's film.
I would define it as a "blaxfishploitation" film. A new genre aimed to attract animal activists, tell them what they want to hear, and sell a rewarding sense of outrage.
In order to get the desired emotional response, the film is trying to mislead the viewer all the time and takes a lot of creative licenses.
Like experts talking about an orca specimen or an event, even if they never worked with orcas or had been fired decades before the arrival of the whale (so didn't have direct experience with neither the whale, nor the event). Of course they will not mention this little details in the film.
Or mixing footage of people and orcas in different years and pools, to make it seem as if they are interacting in the same pool at the same time.
Or inserting a few frames of whales jumping (as a normal part of the show) in the middle of an interview, to suggest a unexpected attack
Or putting words in the mouth of Sea World staff to make them appear as evil, but were debunked later as false, with data.
Or telling that they lied and covered facts in a trial, even if the real declarations where videotaped and show the opposite.
The number of inaccuracies and false claimings does not end here. Here is a list with 69 points (that for a film of just 90 minutes is pretty astonishing):
http://da15bdaf715461308003-0c725c907c2d637068751776aeee5fbf...
However, the "69 errors in 90 minutes" link you attached is an exercise in legalistic hair splitting which really does little to undermine the theme of the movie.
Unfortunately, the cut made by blaxfishploitation was deep and still bleeds today.
To start, Killer wales aren't reproduced in Sea World anymore [2]. This is bad, not good. There are less orcas in the planet.
The damage caused by this film to cetacean research, understanding, and conservation is irreversible. To study wild lions is one thing, to study wild cetaceans is a totally different one. Is much more difficult and field studies at open sea are really expensive. At this moment, we don't even know how many species of Killer whales remain in the planet.
Campaigns to release all captive whales proliferated forcing to the release to some whales by "humanitary" reasons, with the logical result of its death. Good job. Leaving your pooch in a forest so it can run free and make frienship with their brothers wolves, would achieve the same result.
At least one species of dolphin got extinct in our lifetime, something that didn't happened before in all the history of humanity. Other cetaceans are about to vanish forever and do you know what? We can not even talk about breeding cetaceans in captivity without being harassed and called assassins of babies, and Gabriela Cowperthwaite has some responsibility for that, in my opinion.
[1] https://www.micechat.com/53915-blackfish-exposed/
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35829477
But hold, on. The history still can be more sinister...
Jose Luis Barbero worked as dolphin's trainer in Marineland Mallorca until 2015 (two years after blackfish was released). He has an extensive professional experience starting in the 80's, and received the 'Best Trainer' award from the International Marine Trainer's Association IMATA in 1992. He implemented also a swimming with dolphins program as therapy for children autistic and down syndrome.
In 2015 he received an offer for becoming vicepresident to the Georgia's Aquarium in Atlanta and was about to get interviewed for his longtime dream job.
At this moment, an harassment campaign against him started in internet tagging him as animal abuser. A video showing supposedly the proofs was uploaded to internet, and spread like fire for all news, creating a lot of buzz, and surfing in the same wave of outrage that blackfish created.
They video supposedly shows a young Jose Luis kicking and shouting dolphins in a trainer session. Calling it nasty things like "tonto" (dumb) and "vago" (lazy) that could lead to severe depression to any spanish speaker dolphin.
Of course with blackfish spreading rage and justice fire, something like a "swim with dolphins" program was unacceptable and frowned upon by the public: Dolphins could kill people. It seems that the same public don't see any problem with the concept of therapy dogs or horses, even if dogs and horses kill each year thousands of people (and dolphins kill zero). But dolphins are magical mystic non-human humans that came from outer space and appear in all psychodelic posters, and dogs are... just dogs, I suppose.
The association SOS delfines sued Barbero by animal abuse and for violating the law in the therapy dolphins program, and he and his family received the usual package of sadistic death menaces on internet.
The Atlanta's aquarium received a lot of mails threatening with a boycott campaign if they dare to hire him. Afraid of the consequences, they removed the hiring offer, and the rest is known.
Personally I think that the video was clearly fake. Audio and video don't match clearly. The supposed 'kick' to dolphins does not look at all like a kick, and the silhouettes in the video could belong to anybody. As proof of anything would be seen as a highly suspiciously doctored one... but it does not change a bit the fact that it caused real and massive damage in the life of this man without any real possibility of defense.
And if it were real, wow, somebody really hated this man!. Such old video was reserved for decades to be released with surgical precision at the exact time that could do more harm to him?. If the goal was stopping animal abuse, why they waited for decades instead to denounce it ASAP?. This seems a pretty miserable act to me.
Nobody was sued for deliberately destroying the professional reputation of a man, harassing his family and driving him to commit suicide in a parking's airport.
After the "ca-ching" opportunity dissapeared, SOS delfines go 'shalalala' in silent mode. Everybody enjoys a good twitter witch hunt before dinner (It makes you feel morally better than the other guys). The bad man died, hurrah! Isn't marvellous animalism?
What about swimming with them?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTIcQMwYC1o
These are highly intelligent animals with complex behavior and in general, they are pretty friendly to humans. I suspect that the pod in the article has some powerful reason for attacking boats.
The orcas that eat mammals have more varied diets and thus hunting techniques, since their food source requires that (mammals are smart, have good eyesight and hearing, etc.).
Those things haven't appeared in the press. As a result I'd guess that something more specific about these boats, or maybe this place, that has them attacking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Alexander_(ship)
Sperm whales ramming ships that attack them seems less remarkable than whales in general attacking ships during the wooden ship whaling era.
Update: The article on the Essex mentions quite a few more incidents, but still only a handful:
Modern ships can avoid obstacles using motors and navigation, and avoid storms using weather reports. Modern ships avoid sinking by technology, not strength.
Fibreglass hulls in particular are quite fragile - especially sports hulls that are designed to be lighter.
I wonder, however, if there is something more sinister at play. Orcas are very intelligent animals. Is there a chance that they knocked a lone sailor off of a boat once and found a new food source? What if they're trying to replicate previous success? The entire pod could have learned this behavior.
Orcas are known to eat large terrestrial mammals. The fact that we don't have a documented case of them eating humans doesn't mean it can't or hasn't happened.
These are the bears and lions of the sea. Except they're even smarter.
I wouldn't want to be in a small boat or kayak near orcas.