The BBC "Strong Message Here" podcast mentioned orcas removing the livers from sharks to eat and joked about "de-liver" - now every time I see "deliver" I think of liver removal...
If only they didn't live in the sea, and had developed frying pan technology, they could cook shark liver and kelp!
But to me, the interesting question is how the orcas worked out how the great whites had livers in the first place, and why they are the best bits (big bits) to eat? I hope the are not going to investigate mine, but they don't seem interested - yet. See two orcas not eating two teeny humans: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y8iipFTBanc
Fortunately, most orca families appear to have very specialized tastes in food, different from family to family, and quite complex strategies for acquiring the exact kind of food that they prefer.
As long as they can still obtain their chosen food, it seems that they do not have any incentives for experimenting with alternative foods, like teeny humans.
When whales, seals, penguins, sharks etc. will disappear, that might change.
Understand what you are saying - we are not fatty or flavoursome enough. But you have to ask - how do they know that?
I can understand why (for example) big cats are scared of guys carrying AK47s (or even a pointed stick - hello, Maasai), and will run away. But the orcas really can't experience that, and don't seem scared of us at all. Lots of examples of sperm whales attacking humans (see Moby Dick) but none of orcas doing it. I know there are those yacht-bothering things off Spain.
It is strange. Unless they are going to leave us (Douglas Adams) or are just waiting to be our inheritors, which is looking more and more likely.
There is a strong correlation between the behavior an animal will exhibit against a human and the behavior it will exhibit against other animals of its own species.
The animals which do not tolerate other animals of their own species and which will attack them and fight with them are also very likely to attack humans when they believe that humans have invaded their personal space. For example, an adult bear will never be truly friendly with a human, even with a human that has raised it as a cub, because adult bears are never friendly with other bears, but they attack any intruders. On the other hand, a wolf raised by a human can become tame and attached to the human, like a wild wolf would behave towards its real parents.
Similarly, male sperm whales fight viciously with any other male sperm whales and they also do not hesitate to attack any boats with humans that harass them.
AFAIK, intra-specific fighting is not frequent among orcas, but they are used to have good relations between them, even with some from different pods. This may explain their lack of aggressivity against humans, as long as they are not perceived as a possible prey.
I'm interested in those examples of sperm whales attacking humans. I believe those might have been defending and not actively attacking. It is said that Mocha Dick was docile until attacked. And I think that an animal that defends itself when attacked, is a different game.
I haven't heard of cases of people hunting down and fishing Orcas, like we did with Sperm Whales. Perhaps we would have had Orcas attack then?
> But to me, the interesting question is how the orcas worked out how the great whites had livers in the first place, and why they are the best bits (big bits) to eat?
The liver is like right there inside the shark. Open it up and have a look, and take a small bite of all the bits and figure out which tastes best. Might need to cooperate with a friend.
In principle, they could eat the whole shark and notice their favorite parts. That must have happened at least once. In practice, they probably learn it socially.
Here in Scotland, I regularly meet a local gamekeeper who takes his 6 or 7 Labradors out for a walk - working dogs and extremely well behaved (unlike my unruly Samoyed!).
As I understand it, they can go somewhat crosswind, which is all the wing of a 747 manages too. (An angle of attack of 2° is probably a lot better than you can do in a cutter, though, I imagine.) But I don't know much about aerodynamics or sailing, so I could be wrong.
I like Uber but I was surprised at how bad their mapping is - they get the route to get me home wrong and I've gone through the process of telling them about the mistake in their maps and they just seemed to ignore me.
I had kidney stones last year, by far the most painful thing I have experienced, and got opioid based painkillers which made me constipated. To try and fix that I was eating some stoned prunes and it turns out one of them wasn't stoned and I damaged a tooth (it was weak anyway and needed replacement with an implant).
One of the nice things when getting a new Sun workstation back in the day (say 1990 or so) was getting vast amounts of excellent printed documentation and folders into which they had to be clipped. Sun even used to supply proper books (e.g. the PostScript books) with OpenWindows to cover NeWS...
"I am old enough to remember the "ice age" that we were going to enter."
I'm nearly 60 and I don't ever remember anyone talking about an imminent ice age - given my fondness for skiing when I was younger I'm sure I would have noticed.
Surprising. I'm 54 and the coming ice age was pretty widely published in my childhood. Lenard Nimoy had a movie about it, it was in Newsweek etc (and before you laugh, Newsweek was "real news" back in those days and my parents had a mail subscription).
I remember being extremely worried about it as a child and thinking "I am the last generation to know civilization as it has been before the world freezes over!"
It probably goes without saying but I haven't been especially concerned about global warming this go around.
There was one Newsweek article about it, and the Leonard Nimoy movie you are talking about is most likely “In Search Of…”, which also covered Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle.
You might want to double check that claim about Newsweek being the only coverage. I've seen climate crisis promoters say that, but it's misinformation. Global cooling was widely discussed by scientists and journalists from about the early 60s up to the mid 1970s, when recorded temperatures stopped falling.
They held international conferences to discuss it and wrote to the US President with their conclusions, warning him of the certainty of an impending ice age. This tweet [2] has the first page of the letter and an article from the Guardian headlined, "Space satellites show new ice age coming fast", by Anthony Tucker. The first paragraph says:
"WORLDWIDE and rapid trends towards a mini ice age are emerging from the first long term analyses of weather satellite data [...] an analysis carried out at Columbia University by climatologists Doctors George and Helena Kukla indicates that snow and ice cover of the Earth increased by 12% during 1967-1972"
Note that this claim about the data is incompatible with modern claims about the climate. If you try to look up the data they're talking about you'll find it's hard because modern graphs are truncated in the 1980s or even 1990s. The original paper is here [1] and argues the next cooling period will last 8000 years, driven by solar factors.
Back then climatology was obscure, because the idea of climate change being important hadn't been invented yet. You can see the seeds of it being planted with journalists, though:
"The trends appear to be cyclic, fairly long term and extremely important. It is therefore surprising that, in Britain at least, support for historic analysis of the climate is almost non-existent."
The letter to the president warned him to prepare "agriculture and industry" but also said that the ice age had a natural cause.
You can dig up endless pieces of evidence like these, especially if you go back into the journal archives. The papers read just like modern climate papers do, except that they talk about cooling instead of warming and blame natural astronomical cycles (here's another [3] and another [4]). Just search Google Scholar for papers published between 1960 and 1975 containing the phrase "climatic change".
The Leonard Nimoy documentary was part of a pop-sci series. The series did include episodes on the paranormal especially early in its life, but it also had plenty of episodes on general science topics like the study of earthquake prediction, bees, ants, hurricanes, DNA research, biblical historicity and so on. Anything the general public might find interesting. The episode on the coming ice age was grounded in and triggered by claims by the climatologists of the era.
But isn't that just science working as expected - there are a set of different views and over time a consensus evolves? Nobody ever agrees with everything - that's not how science works (at least in my experience).
Edit: I haven't worked in academia for a long time and I wasn't working in anything even remotely related to climate science...
That's not how science is meant to work. These things are fine if they happen in order:
1. We lack data on a topic so are collecting it.
2. Our data is certain but our understanding isn't.
3. Our understanding has been proven and here are some policies.
What's not OK is:
1. Our data shows X and our understanding is certain that Y is happening, so do Z.
2. Our data shows the opposite of X and our understanding is certain that the opposite of Y is happening, so do the opposite of Z.
The Newsweek article mentioned above says: “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve.” So the gap between proposing to melt the polar ice caps and James Hansen testifying about global warming to Congress was only about 13 years.
The point of the scientific method is to build an understanding of a phenomena based on robust evidence, as well as to understand the limits of our own understanding. If a group of people claim to be scientists and then one day invert everything they're saying, then at some point the scientific method has broken down. If they admit that this happened and implement really convincing changes to prevent it ever happening again, then maybe that's recoverable. But if they ignore and try to cover up what happened, that should be the end of that group's credibility and funding. Unfortunately, in this case they have indeed tried to cover it up.
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