The most annoying part? These Orcas “Great White Liver Diet” podcast. Super toxic, a little cult-y.
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Its tough to shuck fava beans or open up a bottle of wine without opposable thumbs.
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I’m sure there are already designated pods working on transdelphinidism
I swear, once upon a time that headline included “Oh Shit, Says Mankind…”
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Orca are coming off like the Canadian Geese of the oceans.
Aggressive organized jerks to all other species.
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Hey! No fair! That’s our niche.
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That may well be true, however, this is a great example of pointing the finger in the wrong direction. Why are Great Whites threatened? It probably has little to do with orcas and much more to do with humans. So the immediate reaction is that we need to change orca behaviour here?
Orcas themselves are a threatened species/subpopulation in some places (they are listed in CITES Appendix II, and IUCN has trouble classifying them because they may be subspecies).
This is an evolutionary process playing out and, leaving humans aside, extinction is a natural process. Unfortunately humans are a walking extinction event, but what gives us the right to choose the winners and losers in this case? And how are we going to intervene? Hunting orcas?
Seems like a situation where humans should observe and try to understand more and appreciate that there are more intelligences than just ours on this small blue orb.
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I really don’t think this is fair to the orcas. It is projecting a human value system onto a non-human species. It’s nothing like the human practice of shark finning in that sense, because we have no idea what the meaning of this practice (and its recent evolution) is to orcas themselves. While it might be unsettling on the surface, there could be a deeper motivation or reason here that we aren’t appreciating. Humans aren’t in a great position to be judging.
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“Are Orcas the assholes of the fish kingdom? Find out tonight on FOX news.”
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It’s not an evolution, it’s something they learned. I am all for trying to understand and appreciate more about intelligences other than our own. With that, though, I think it’s also pretty clear that sometimes animals can be dicks too. 
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Yeah, well, just wait until the orcas discover how much (well seasoned) liver you can get from a cruise ship… 
Jam the props with a few shark carcasses then start working on the anchor chains…
/me Calls the producers of Sharknado with a new pitch.
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Shark livers, like those of polar bears, are chock-full of vitamin A, to the point that bear livers are considered dangerously toxic to eat. #science!
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Just your regular reminder that pack tactics and social cooperation is an overpowered survival tactic. The sharks are quite vulnerable due to their solitary nature.
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They’ll nerf that tactic in the next update, I’m sure.
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As long as its taken them to fix the hydrofoil and siphon hacks, and judging by the headlines, I think the devs have let the writing derpartment take over.
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Supposedly, rubbing shark liver oil on recent wounds while they are healing can dramatically reduce scarring, too.
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Okay, fair point - I didn’t intend that in the Darwinist sense (though the capacity to learn in such a way, which orcas show all the time, is certainly a result of evolution).
What I contend is that just calling this “dick” behaviour is a projection - we don’t really understand the basis of the behaviour or its context within orca culture. Maybe it’s plain dickishness in the human sense. Maybe they learned that the great whites were harassing some other species and decided to make an example of them? Who knows?
The idea biologists should “worry” about this behaviour and what it might mean for GWS conservation is misguided - first because it will get prioritized over other human activities that are probably having a greater impact, second because whatever corrective action is enacted will negatively affect orcas, and third because it places humans in the driver seat about making judgements about what species or other aspects of nature are more valuable.
If biologists are worried about this, maybe they should also be worried about ants that “farm” aphids, parasites that enslave their hosts, monkeys that throw their poo, chimpanzees that go to war, mantises that bite off their lovers’ heads, or toxic male Bighorn sheep that headbutt each other on rocky mountainsides. The main reason that this orca behaviour stands out and is shocking to people is its recentness and its deadly nature.
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Ok, I guess you’d like this to be something more sublime than just orcas figuring out shark livers are tasty…but at least understand biologists aren’t actually stupid. Sometimes conservation is a balancing act. That doesn’t mean it’s never a good idea, and it definitely doesn’t mean people are somehow going to forget about the human impacts everywhere the way you keep claiming. That’s half of what marine biologists study even when they’re not trying to.
Being worried, in the sense of paying attention to what goes on, seems very sensible to me. These are both species we should care about, and don’t nearly enough.
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Self-anthropomorphizing sea mammals?
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