Try to imagine a similar situation for humans. It would be as if gangs of canibalistic dwarves just stalked you, waited for you to be vulnerable (like casually getting the mail), and then attacked you with knives and started eating you on the street. Stay strong, blue whales.
I have a student, whose favorite animal is an orca, that would go gaga over this. Definitely needs to be perma muted though. Would also help if they have pictures and stuff to show because autism.
Hopefully this works. Starts in an hour. Link will be live about 20 minutes before start. Spoiler https://alumniq.wwu.edu/join/AD72FAB6-D0C5-4F47-83D7750E1903EC30/200 The password to join the event is 7CMX6k
Lolita The Orca Set To Be Released After 50 Years At Miami Seaquarium After 50 years of performing and entertaining visitors at the Miami Seaquarium in Florida, Lolita, the killer whale, is set to be released back in her home waters in the Pacific Northwest. Spoiler Lolita, also known as Tokitae, was taken from the ocean in 1970 when she was seven. Lolita has spent the last 53 years living in a tank that is 80 feet long and 35 feet wide. She has not performed for the past year due to health issues. "Lolita will receive the highest quality care as the team works to make relocation possible in the next 18 to 24 months," Miami Seaquarium said in a statement. Officials believe that Lolita's mother is still alive and hope they can reunite the pair. "(There's) the opportunity for her to acoustically connect with her family, without a doubt," Charles Vinick, the executive director of the Whale Sanctuary Project, told WPLG. "So, acoustically, yes, and potentially physically over time." Moving the 5,000-pound orca whale is not going to be an easy task and could require the use of a 747 plane or a C-17 military plane to transport Lolita across the country. In addition, after spending years in captivity, Lolita has to be taught how to live in the wild again. "I know Lolita wants to get to free waters. I don't care what anyone says. She's lived this long to have this opportunity. And my only mission is (…) to help this whale get free," said Jim Irsay, the Indianapolis Colts owner who is helping to pay for Lolita's move. The cost to relocate Lolita could top eight figures.
Orcas have sunk 3 boats in Europe and appear to be teaching others to do the same. But why? Story by Sascha Pare • Yesterday 10:01 AM Orcas have mainly directed their efforts at sailboats, making a beeline for the rudder.© Shutterstock Spoiler Orcas have attacked and sunk a third boat off the Iberian coast of Europe, and experts now believe the behavior is being copied by the rest of the population. Three orcas (Orcinus orca), also known as killer whales, struck the yacht on the night of May 4 in the Strait of Gibraltar, off the coast of Spain, and pierced the rudder. "There were two smaller and one larger orca," skipper Werner Schaufelberger told the German publication Yacht. "The little ones shook the rudder at the back while the big one repeatedly backed up and rammed the ship with full force from the side." Schaufelberger said he saw the smaller orcas imitate the larger one. "The two little orcas observed the bigger one's technique and, with a slight run-up, they too slammed into the boat." Spanish coast guards rescued the crew and towed the boat to Barbate, but it sank at the port entrance. Two days earlier, a pod of six orcas assailed another sailboat navigating the strait. Greg Blackburn, who was aboard the vessel, looked on as a mother orca appeared to teach her calf how to charge into the rudder. "It was definitely some form of education, teaching going on," Blackburn told 9news. Reports of aggressive encounters with orcas off the Iberian coast began in May 2020 and are becoming more frequent, according to a study published June 2022 in the journal Marine Mammal Science. Assaults seem to be mainly directed at sailing boats and follow a clear pattern, with orcas approaching from the stern to strike the rudder, then losing interest once they have successfully stopped the boat. "The reports of interactions have been continuous since 2020 in places where orcas are found, either in Galicia or in the Strait," said co-author Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal and representative of the Grupo de Trabajo Orca Atlántica, or Atlantic Orca Working Group. Most encounters have been harmless, López Fernandez told Live Science in an email. "In more than 500 interaction events recorded since 2020 there are three sunken ships. We estimate that killer whales only touch one ship out of every hundred that sail through a location." The spike in aggression towards boats is a recent phenomenon, López Fernandez said. Researchers think that a traumatic event may have triggered a change in the behavior of one orca, which the rest of the population has learned to imitate. "The orcas are doing this on purpose, of course, we don't know the origin or the motivation, but defensive behavior based on trauma, as the origin of all this, gains more strength for us every day," López Fernandez said. Experts suspect that a female orca they call White Gladis suffered a "critical moment of agony" — a collision with a boat or entrapment during illegal fishing — that flipped a behavioral switch. "That traumatized orca is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat," López Fernandez said. Orcas are social creatures that can easily learn and reproduce behaviors performed by others, according to the 2022 study. In the majority of reported cases, orcas have made a beeline for a boat's rudder and either bitten, bent or broken it. "We do not interpret that the orcas are teaching the young, although the behavior has spread to the young vertically, simply by imitation, and later horizontally among them, because they consider it something important in their lives," López Fernandez said. Orcas appear to perceive the behavior as advantageous, despite the risk they run by slamming into moving boat structures, López Fernandez added. Since the abnormal interactions began in 2020, four orcas belonging to a subpopulation living in Iberian waters have died, although their deaths cannot be directly linked to encounters with boats. The unusual behavior could also be playful or what researchers call a "fad" — a behavior initiated by one or two individuals and temporarily picked up by others before it’s abandoned. "They are incredibly curious and playful animals and so this might be more of a play thing as opposed to an aggressive thing," Deborah Giles, an orca researcher at the University of Washington and at the non-profit Wild Orca, told Live Science. As the number of incidents grows, there is increased concern both for sailors and for the Iberian orca subpopulation, which is listed as critically endangered by the IUCN Red List. The last census, in 2011, recorded just 39 Iberian orcas, according to the 2022 study. "If this situation continues or intensifies, it could become a real concern for the mariners' safety and a conservation issue for this endangered subpopulation of killer whales," the researchers wrote.
Orca Rams Into Yacht Near Scotland, Suggesting the Behavior May Be Spreading The incident occurred roughly 2,000 miles away from the recent encounters near Spain and Portugal Spoiler Sarah Kuta Daily Correspondent June 26, 2023 A recent incident suggests the boat-bashing behavior of orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar might be spreading to other groups. Stuart Westmorland via Getty Images Orcas have been ramming into ships off the coasts of Spain and Portugal and making headlines worldwide, but until now, the behavior appeared contained to that one population. Last week, however, one of these black-and-white mammals slammed into a yacht between Scotland and Norway, some 2,000 miles away from the Iberian orcas. Though scientists don’t quite know what to make of the recent incident, they say it might mean the behavior is spreading. This is believed to be the first known orca-boat encounter in northern waters, as Philip Hoare and Jeroen Hoekendijk report for the Guardian. On June 19, Dutch sailor Wim Rutten spotted an orca in the waters of the North Sea while traveling east from the Shetland Islands of Scotland. Rutten, 72, was using a single line off the back of the boat to fish for mackerel, when seemingly out of nowhere, the orca rammed into the stern of his seven-ton, aluminum hull yacht. The creature then proceeded to hit the vessel multiple times. It swam behind the boat and appeared to be searching for the keel, or the main structural support that runs along the bottom of a boat’s hull from front to back. The orca got so close that Rutten could hear its “very loud breathing,” he tells the Guardian. “Maybe he just wanted to play,” he adds to the publication. “Or look me in the eyes. Or to get rid of the fishing line.” Though the incident shook him up a bit, Rutten made it home safely. Scientists are intrigued that this behavior occurred so far away from the Iberian orcas. One possible explanation is that the North Sea orca was a juvenile that simply got curious about the fishing line coming off the back of Rutten’s boat. However, the behavior could have spread from the Spain and Portugal subpopulation, perhaps transmitted by very mobile orcas. “It’s possible that this ‘fad’ is leapfrogging through the various pods/communities,” says Conor Ryan, an independent researcher who advises the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust, to the Guardian. Meanwhile, off the Iberian coast, the boat-ramming behavior is still going strong: Last week, a pod of orcas slammed into a yacht as it got near the Strait of Gibraltar during the Ocean Race, an around-the-world sailing competition. The group on the yacht took down its sails and slowed their vessel as much as possible, and the orcas stopped bashing the ship soon after. In a statement, Jelmer van Beek, the team’s skipper, described the incident as a “scary moment.” “[It was] impressive to see the orcas, first of all, beautiful animals, but also a dangerous moment for us in the team,” he says in a video by the Ocean Race. (Warning: The video contains profanity.) In the case of the orcas off the coasts of Portugal and Spain, scientists suspect that a female named “White Gladis” may be at least partially responsible for the recent interactions: They worry she had a traumatic run-in with a boat that gave rise to the new behavior, which other orcas are now learning via observation. Since the summer of 2020, scientists have recorded more than 500 incidents involving contact between the Iberian orcas and boats, including three that resulted in the vessels sinking, per Live Science’s Sacha Pare. About 20 percent of the encounters damaged the boats so badly they could not continue sailing. And in one recent incident, a group of orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar followed a boat all the way into port, even after they’d destroyed its rudder. In Spain, authorities are now tagging and tracking six of the Iberian orcas that have been involved in the incidents. Next, they want to share the animals’ locations with sailors in hopes of avoiding future interactions. However, not everyone supports this plan. Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro and a member of the Atlantic Orca Working Group, has been studying the interactions and believes shooting satellite tags at the whales will only aggravate the creatures further. “The orcas will surely not find it very funny,” he tells RTVE’s Samuel A. Pilar.
went fishing today and laughed at this note on the map because of this thread/the recent orca news. i'm sure it's an environmental policy and is unrelated to the recent sinkings but a man can dream...
If anyone has Disney+ or NatGeo, there’s a show called Animals Up Close. The episode where he’s in Antarctica filming killer whales is incredible. Highly recommend.