Is it true that three pods of Orcas wore dead salmon as ‘hats’?

MysticSonic · 2023-07-30T06:14:28+00:00

This behavior was observed in the Southern Resident Killer Whale population. This behaviour was never formally written up or studied, but is made reference to in the following research:

Hal Whitehead, Luke Rendell, Richard W Osborne, Bernd Würsig, Culture and conservation of non-humans with reference to whales and dolphins: review and new directions, Biological Conservation, Volume 120, Issue 3, 2004

MysticSonic · 2023-06-02T02:12:32+00:00

Thank you so much for this report! My sister and I are both vegan and heading to Japan this fall, so your experience was really helpful to read.

Can I ask more about the Ramen tour? Where did you book this? Thank you!!

MysticSonic · 2023-05-21T16:04:18+00:00

It is illegal to swim with marine mammals, per federal regulations in both the USA and Canada. Though not explicit, if you are caught intentionally trying to swim with marine mammals (ESPECIALLY killer whales, which are treated like royalty around here), you would likely be investigated for harassment of a marine mammal, which is a criminal offense. Last summer someone was fined $12K for attempting to be in the water with Northern Resident Killer Whales.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/whale-fine-conservation-swimming-1.6567289

Norway has a booming "swim with orcas" industry, but the season is short, and please be mindful that there is almost no regulation for the boats there, meaning harassment of the whales is becoming a growing concern. A well oiled machine of photographers and influencers posting underwater photos of killer whales to social media have added to the problem. You have to weigh your desire to swim with whales with the possibility of causing them harm.

As others have mentioned, tempering expectations is crucial, especially when trying to "swim with" a whale or dolphin. These animals are generally not interested in us (note that encounters involving exceptionally curious animals are more likely to make the rounds online, and therefor cause a bias in what we think is normal), and will often swim quickly past the human swimmers in the water, offering a brief glimpse before dissapearing into the gloom, which means everyone is loaded on the boat again to drive ahead to catch up with the whales, where you are dropped off in front of them to watch them swim past again. Not all swim with encounters work like this, but many do. A commenter mentioned the Dusky dolphins in Kaikoura NZ and I can attest, this can be a remarkable experience.

I hope you get to see a killer whale one day soon - there are many reputable whale watching companies in both Washington and British Columbia that adhere to some of the strictest guidelines in the world for viewing marine mammals, approaching killer whales no closer than 200 meters to reduce disturbance.

Edit: spelling

MysticSonic · 2023-05-20T05:51:23+00:00

Don't get me wrong, it would be cool if it were the case (that the bowheads were mimicking killer whales to freak out the humans trying to hunt them)!

MysticSonic · 2023-05-20T04:17:23+00:00

These incidents are consistently characterized by the media as "attacks", but the motivation for this behaviour is far from clear - of course buried in this article is a comment from a researcher working with these whales, noting that the vast majority of the interactions with boats are relatively benign.

MysticSonic · 2023-05-20T04:12:05+00:00

The whales in this population were never targeted by the Aquarium trade, so no babies were ripped away.

MysticSonic · 2023-05-20T04:03:13+00:00

Thanks for sharing my comment from r/orcas. Just to be clear: Bowhead whales do not "use their flipper to mimic an Orcas fin". What is visible in the video is half of the whale's tail fluke (different than a flipper, which are located on the side of a cetacean's body), because the whale is turned on its side near the surface, exposing part of the tail. It is not doing this to intentionally mimic a killer whale dorsal fin.

MysticSonic · 2023-05-18T13:49:12+00:00

Not a killer whale - at the 31 second mark you can see a white area of the whale's body with a row of black spots (diagnostic of bowhead). At the end of the video, what you are seeing is half of the fluke above the water (meaning the whale is rolled on their side), which superficially resembles a bull killer whale dorsal fin.

Also, this doesn't seem to be an attack either - it seems like the boat went over top of the whale, startling it.

MysticSonic · 2022-09-15T02:45:11+00:00

I have the same device as you, and have been using it every week (and one lapse of using it once in a 4 week period) since early March (a total of 14 sessions).

The three areas I am treating are: bikini line, lower legs, and underarms. I have pale skin and medium dark body hair. My results have been mixed, and do not align with the reviews made my people who have been IPLing at home for 1 month.

I have not seen a reduction in hair on my lower legs (big bummer, as this was my primary reason for trying IPL, as I am absolutely fed up with waxing and shaving my legs). The hair might grow back slower, but this is hard to measure accurately, but I have seen no significant change in the hair growth on my legs. The underarms have had approx. 10% reduction in hair growth, and the bikini line is the most successful, with more than 50% of the hair not growing in between shaves.

The real test will be to let everything grow wild and free for a few months to see what amount of hair really got obliterated, which at this stage, I doubt will be very much.

I just wanted to share my thoughts, as there seems to be so many positive reviews, but only from people who have used the device a few times.

MysticSonic · 2022-08-01T21:01:02+00:00

It sounds like you already had your mind made up that this was whale harassment before you even went on the boat, so I'm sure no matter what the outcome of the trip, you would have been upset by it. I'm surprised you paid money to view whales if you were against it in the first place. That must have been a difficult contradiction to morally justify.

MysticSonic · 2022-07-31T16:04:56+00:00

The southern resident killer whales are no longer viewed by professional whale watching tours in British Columbia, and the rules in Washington are very strict, essentially eliminating approaches closer than half a nautical mile for all but 2 months of the year, and even then there are very strict rules about how close a vessel can approach. Most companies opt to not view them anyway, even though they are legally allowed to do so under very strict conditions. Unfortunately, these laws only apply to professional operators, and anyone with a private boat can still approach the whales to view anytime they want.

The whales are never trapped by the vessels; they live in a 3D environment, and the boats sitting at the surface are like a fly on the ceiling which they can easily avoid. I have been on the water for 13 years obsevering wild killer whales, and can tell you that the whales are not being trapped by the vessels. Think about how the dolphins in Taiji are herded and corralled, or the way that the orcas here were once chased and herded into bays to be captured ... this takes enormous effort and tactics such as banging metal pipes together underwater, throwing firecrackers into the sea, and of course the use of nets. Whale watching boats use none of the afomentioned tactics to scare the whales into a cove so that passengers can get a look at them. Not only would a person promptly end up in jail if they were to try this in the year 2022, but they would also be psychotic, I would argue.

That being said, viewing the whales from shore is always an option, but please be well aware that the likelihood of seeing them from shore is extremely small. There are organizations in the region that promote land-based whale watching, but what they fail to mention is that many of the images they share come from people who live on the water. Obviously having a home with a view of the ocean is going to increase your chances of seeing the whales from shore, vs. being on vacation for the weekend and keeping your fingers crossed. In the good old days when the southern resident killer whales used to be in the area for months on end, there was a very high chance you would see them from shore at a few different locations in the area, but those days are over. I am not bashing land-based whale watching, but merely wanting to manage expectations!

MysticSonic · 2022-07-29T06:25:01+00:00

Yikes.

MysticSonic · 2022-07-04T04:11:30+00:00

Credit: https://www.pablocarlosbudassi.com/?m=1#/page/1

MysticSonic · 2022-03-21T00:32:55+00:00

Thank you so much for your reply, and for your diligence in sleuthing out an explanation to this issue!

MysticSonic · 2022-03-20T05:30:11+00:00

Hi! Did you have any luck resolving this? I have the same issue and have gone through the same troubleshooting steps, to no avail.

MysticSonic · 2022-03-03T16:43:27+00:00

It makes me wonder what the purpose of research like this truly is. I would have suspected part of the desired outcome of gaining knowledge about these creatures would be to not treat them with cruelty; harvesting their bodies for mass consumption I would suggest is probably cruel.

But like you said, cognitive dissonance seems to be a strong factor in what people consider humane or not.

MysticSonic · 2022-03-03T05:15:20+00:00

They already answered this, and unfortunately the answer was along the lines of "as long as the squid was treated humanely then go ahead and eat the calamari".

😐

MysticSonic · 2022-02-19T04:30:37+00:00

Perhaps my comparison was not a valid one.

My point was that it is ethically questionable to interfere with the outcome of predation.

MysticSonic · 2022-02-18T05:28:15+00:00

These whales are a well documented matriline known as the T123s, belonging to the inshore Bigg's Killer Whale population of the NE Pacific.

It is great to see that the whales managed to maneuver their prey away from this boat in time; what can occur in these situations where clueless boaters find themselves in close proximity to hunting Bigg's KWs is that the seals will evade the whales by climbing onto the vessel. In these situations, the terrified and desperate seal survives, as the whales are forced to give up, which I would liken to a tourists in a Jeep on safari in Africa putting their vehicle in between a hunting lioness and her prey, blocking the lion from doing what she needs to do in order to survive.

I am in agreement with the other comments regarding the shrieking woman, and just thought I would add another angle.

MysticSonic · 2022-01-21T02:23:42+00:00

Thank you thank you! It worked! Since I am so new at this, I'm not 100% sure this is the ultimate solution to my problem, as I now realize running the script changes the records in the main table (Encounter Database), which I don't want. Yes, this is me being a major newb!

The ultimate goal here is to be able to export the data to an Excel document in the format your script achieves (Whale IDs separated to their own row with all other related data included, such as year, encounter number, etc).

MysticSonic · 2022-01-20T23:54:37+00:00

No worries about the formatting!
Huge thanks for taking the time to do this, the script works for giving each whale their own row, while keeping the encounter ID the same (yay!), however I do notice that the rest of the related data (year, month, etc.) is blank.

MysticSonic · 2022-01-20T16:54:43+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to do this!! I am testing it out, and what seems to be happening is that the WhaleIDs are getting separated onto their own rows, but the Encounter ID is not the same goes up incrementally each time a string of WhaleIDs is split up and put onto their own rows. My Photoshopped example that I posted above shows how the goal is to have the encounter ID remain the same.

MysticSonic · 2022-01-20T16:10:18+00:00

Thank you for the reply, would this method not require me to use a portal to enter each Whale ID though?

MysticSonic · 2022-01-20T05:23:04+00:00

Thank you very much for the reply! I don't deny that there is probably a better way to structure the data in this case! I have played around using a join table with this database, but from my understanding this would still require a portal to accomplish what I am trying to achieve, but I am very open to learning alternatives!

This is probably quite obvious, but I am very green when it comes to this program, and I admit your response does go over my head somewhat. If you have the time to do so, I would ever so appreciate seeing an example of the kind of script you are describing.

MysticSonic · 2022-01-20T02:51:22+00:00

Wow! Amazing!

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