There must have been so much unseen behavior when there were millions more whales in the ocean. Here's hoping that we can see more
sidewndr46 1 days ago [-]
Given the current trajectory of whale populations, 'we' probably won't be seeing that. Maybe in many generations of humans.
cortesoft 1 days ago [-]
Well, the population growth probably isn't linear, so maybe?
mulnz 1 days ago [-]
Warming will kill off most of the systems these animals depend on within 30 years.
vasco 1 days ago [-]
Why put a number on it? Every number so far has been wrong. Can we agree on the negative impacts of humans on an environment conducive to humanity without putting obviously wrong timings on predictions? I bet your intention is to provoke urgency but to most people it just causes an eye roll because it's not true, whereas the underlying ideas are true.
pretzel5297 1 days ago [-]
Very much agree. It's a pretty common mistake to bundle real information with obviously wrong details and lose credibility. Especially in the eyes of people looking for a reason to discredit the argument.
jackmott42 21 hours ago [-]
The disingenuous people who discredit climate change will do so no matter how serious people act. There is no point in changing behavior on their account.
griffzhowl 18 hours ago [-]
The point is to convince people who are undecided. Using information that's known to be false or weakly supported is then short-sighted and counterproductive, because enough false predictions will turn up that those undecided will tune out entirely
qsera 9 hours ago [-]
>Using information that's known to be false or weakly supported
But where does such information originate from? Is laypeople just making it up?
griffzhowl 27 minutes ago [-]
It applies to anyone knowingly using false information to try to influence people
20 hours ago [-]
23 hours ago [-]
cindyllm 24 hours ago [-]
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cultofmetatron 1 days ago [-]
cod fishing boats used to have to be wary of the catch being so big that it would tip the boat.
We have no real frame of reference for what we've already lost.
vasco 1 days ago [-]
Of course we do, you just gave an example. In fact if we truly didn't, then there would be no problem.
snaking0776 1 days ago [-]
I think their point is that discounting the time estimates is more a constant shifting of the window of what we expect more than them being de-facto incorrect. They’re more off by degree (e.g. an XX% reduction vs complete extinction) than being worthless. As the example points out a large reduction can be very similar to an annihilation it’s just that we are only used to what we know so we constantly shift what is normal.
tclancy 24 hours ago [-]
You have sailed past the point. There were so, so many cod it was hard not to catch a bunch. That isn’t a metric, it’s an indicator that most likely meant vast unseen numbers. The tip of the iceberg is a metaphor for a reason, though it may become an anachronism within our lifetimes.
vasco 7 hours ago [-]
The argument is that we didn't notice, not that it's a predictor or whatever. And we noticed, so the argument is not good.
tbrownaw 22 hours ago [-]
Weakening predictions until they become unfalsifiable seems like an odd approach to being taken seriously.
vasco 5 hours ago [-]
So make predictions about stuff that happens next year and be right about them. The problem is that strongly predicting what will happen in 30 years has always been wrong so far. My point is just focus on what you know. Anyone can say whatever about 30 years from now and ride that for the next 29.
dTal 2 hours ago [-]
>strongly predicting what will happen in 30 years has always been wrong so far
No it hasn't, this is climate change denialist nonsense. In fact no less a figure than ExxonMobil correctly predicted the trajectory of global CO2 levels and corresponding increase in warming as far back as the 1970s and their predictions remain accurate today.
vasco 45 minutes ago [-]
I've been alive long enough that my hometown was supposed to be underwater several times already. Climate change is real and predictions have also been very wrong.
dTal 2 hours ago [-]
>Every number so far has been wrong
No it hasn't.
luqtas 20 hours ago [-]
because whales can communicate into the thousands of kilometers range and nowadays, because of marine traffic, they are luck to get into the hundred meters
micro-plastics into the ocean don't have a good prognosis on numbers reduction
global warming has a huge effect on oceanic life
and so on. maybe the number is much worse
rexpop 16 hours ago [-]
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booleandilemma 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
darth_avocado 17 hours ago [-]
> 50 years of failed climate predictions
Right. Just because some predictions weren’t accurate, doesn’t mean they were directionally inaccurate. You biodiversity and total volume of plant/animal/marine biomass that’s not human or commercially consumed by humans has depleted in the last 50 years and it only accelerates every year. There objectively will be fewer whales, if any in 50 years. Life as we know is ending and has been for decades.
voakbasda 21 hours ago [-]
Because they think it might make people give a shit enough to do something to change that outcome?
Fear is a strong motivator, but it is not a good one in this case. To really be effective, there must be the threat of direct, immediate, and severe consequences.
Instead it causes people to treat their messages as hyperbolic and undermines their entire movement.
ndisn 20 hours ago [-]
There also has been, in the past, threat of indirect consequences that would happen in the future and which never came true.
elmomle 19 hours ago [-]
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SecretDreams 21 hours ago [-]
> What I'm wondering is why is there such a push for this stuff? Why does someone want everyone to think life as we know it is ending?
Simple thought exercise (it's a 2x2):
What are the consequences of climate change being consequential vs inconsequential?
What are the consequences of us doing too little or too much to mitigate climate change?
Which quadrants are most consequential for the future of our planet?
SecretDreams 20 hours ago [-]
tl;dr is there's very poor ROI to do nothing to improve our polluting habits and banking on the world sorting itself out.
Furthermore, most actions we can take to improve climate outcomes can also improve societal and technological outcomes. The only downside to taking more actions to have clean energy and less pollution are based on made up economic rules that normal people are supposed to follow, but that the super rich/powerful skirt at their leisure. A cleaner future benefits the VAST majority, irrespective of climate change. And the bonus is that if climate change does progress, we're better suited to manage it.
Or we can keep burning liquified dinosaur bones and partying like cigarettes don't cause cancer. I get the appeal of the 60s for how care free people could be - they lived without consequence. And we're stuck dealing with their failed policies.
pastage 19 hours ago [-]
While I have no problem blaming the rich. You are post here you are most probably part of those people who are skirting it at their leisure. Even I with a life long devotion to climate and environmental issues have a hard time to be a positive effect. The only way to not skirt your responsibilities right now is to be a Greta Thunberg.
> liquified dinosaur bones
I know this is a nice factoid that does not need to be true. When I was 13 I did believed it, so now days I try to not spread this factoid. We can talk about the fascinating history of millions of years of efficient carbon storage on our planet.
latchkey 18 hours ago [-]
> I know this is a nice factoid that does not need to be true. When I was 13 I did believed it, so now days I try to not spread this factoid.
I took it as sarcasm.
SecretDreams 16 hours ago [-]
Correct.
SecretDreams 16 hours ago [-]
The rich and powerful bit was specifically around how we could easily do more for clean energy and pollution if politicians and ultra elites stopped acting like it's economics preventing us to do so. World powers are fine to go to war on a whim, but the second we talk about health care, cleaner energy, pollution, or other topics that will broadly benefit humanity, we are met with "this is too expensive to do".
vedmed 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lowken10 21 hours ago [-]
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ilt 1 days ago [-]
And will give way to many which thrive or evolve to thrive in hotter climates?
netcan 1 days ago [-]
In human time scales, the species which thrive will tend to be the adaptive generalists. Evolution takes time.
dredmorbius 16 hours ago [-]
And: on the 'r' side of the r/K reproductive strategy. Whales are literally the exemplar of K-selection, that is a very small number of high-quality offspring.
Whale lifespans are long, populations and fecundity / brood sizes are small, sexual maturity relatively late, and childhood mortality relatively high. All of these make for slower rather than more rapid evolution.
Species such as krill (on which many whales feed) are far more likely to evolve rapidly in the face of increasing selection pressures. Whales might well find themselves boxed into an inescapable evolutionary corner.
ygjb 1 days ago [-]
It's gonna take a minute (on a geological timescale) for the ecosystems to be able to reliably sustain megafauna again.
gameman144 1 days ago [-]
Given that we support megafauna today, could you explain why? Legitimately asking, since I don't see a reason they couldn't adapt just as well.
gdupont 1 days ago [-]
Because evolution is slow and the climate change is going fast.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
Evolution of small things like algae and the krill which feed on it and feed the whale is quite fast. Single celled organisms reproduce on the scale of 20 minutes and hold immense amounts of genetic diversity in their populations to facilitate the success of a better adapted line almost immediately. Additionally, they are adept at horizontal gene transfer from other well-adapted organisms.
kulahan 1 days ago [-]
This would be great news if the whale literally only required krill to survive, but complex megafauna have complex needs, so the ability of krill and other small creatures to evolve is largely irrelevant in a discussion regarding the ability of megafauna to survive. This is especially true if you read TFA and see that the whales already adapt to eat different things as necessary.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
Humpbacks have a highly specialized feeding mechanism. They only prey on krill and small fish.
The food chain really is sun -> algae -> krill (and sometimes small fish) -> humpback whale
jounker 1 days ago [-]
In recent years we’ve learned that humpbacks are generalist feeders with a wide variety of feeding strategies adapted to different kinds of prey.
timschmidt 23 hours ago [-]
Humpbacks will switch between Krill (their staple in many regions) and small schooling fish (herring, sand lance, anchovies, etc.).
But they don’t eat large fish, squid regularly, or anything like seals - so they’re not “generalists” in the broad, anything-goes sense.
They’re still constrained by their baleen filter-feeding system, which limits them to tiny prey
bmitc 23 hours ago [-]
That's just one view of the stack and isn't a systems view. Other things support and interact with those other things.
timschmidt 23 hours ago [-]
Algae are the bottom of the ocean food chain. Everything interacts with it. But algae's happy to grow in a bowl of water left in the sun.
Lots of things eat krill and small fish. They're near the bottom of the foodchain too. In addition to algae, krill are opportunistic omnivores who often consume detritus. But their primary diet is algae. Small fish tend to be pretty similar.
It's not that other things don't interact with algae or krill or small fish, it's that those groups are the foundation bedrock of the ocean ecology. And single celled organisms like algae are tough as nails in aggregate. Couldn't kill them all if we tried. Pool owners will be familiar with the struggle.
bmitc 18 hours ago [-]
But it's not a bottom up interaction. If whales are killed off from climate change, then those other things can get out of control. Too much algae, and then you have hypoxic environments.
A perfect example of this is when sea otters were nearly hunted to extinction which caused sea urchins to flourish which caused the death of coral and coastal environments which started to affect the larger things that depended on those environments.
My point is that any change to the careful balance can have non-linear effects.
timschmidt 16 hours ago [-]
I think we're coming at this from different directions. The OP I responded to originally said: "Warming will kill off most of the systems these animals depend on within 30 years." which isn't what you're talking about. A top-down extinction looks like whaling in the 1800s and we already had that. Now they're on the mend.
We would need 1000x faster, so that doesn’t really change anything.
TeMPOraL 1 days ago [-]
It could easily become this fast or even faster, if we would just stop worrying so much about "playing god" and focus instead on getting good at this job. We don't have much time for this either, as AI is on the trajectory to take over that mantle in the next decade or three, whether we like it or not.
But seriously, we may not have much choice. Natural evolution stopped being able to adapt to environmental changes after it created us; genetic engineering is essentially the only way to make biology adaptable enough again.
vasco 1 days ago [-]
The next question is which traits to do you choose and the next question is which traits are better, because choices will imply ordering, and then you open a big can of worms that last time killed millions of people. So maybe there's other ways to avoid doom that didn't create doom last time we went down the path.
kakacik 1 days ago [-]
Unpopular opinion for obvious reasons, but probably the only realistic one apart from just witnessing one extinction after another. Pollution and climate change aint going anywhere until we elevate whole world to the level of say western Europe.
But since we humans are pretty arrogant with our wisdom and lack long term patience, I can see many ways where well-intended meddling can end up in catastrophe overall.
thrance 1 days ago [-]
Sure, in a few million years.
gilrain 1 days ago [-]
Not at the pace of change we’ve chosen to accept, no.
wahnfrieden 1 days ago [-]
It’s game over for a very long time
napierzaza 1 days ago [-]
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kjkjadksj 23 hours ago [-]
Imagine you killed off all of humanity save for a couple people in Muncie, IN. How long until the next Shakespeare or Einstein emerges? Better yet, a properly heterogeneous culture?
crumby 24 hours ago [-]
Super Groups usually don't turn out as good as they sound like they should. One or two good songs over the course of multiple albums at best.
xhkkffbf 24 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Asia comes to mind. Even its best song wasn't so great.
gcanyon 16 hours ago [-]
Well, it was the heat of the moment...
swframe2 1 days ago [-]
I hope we create whalegemma (similar to dolphingemma) so we can explain to them how to co-exist better with humans (e.g. avoid this area during their whale hunting season, travel to this area if you get sick or tangled in rope).
zyxin 1 days ago [-]
There is a group that is attempting to communicate with whales by training a transformer based model on whale sounds.
It's just a pity we couldn't figure out how to better coexist with whales.
CalRobert 1 days ago [-]
We know how, but we choose not to.
The same goes for most of our ecological problems, really.
amelius 1 days ago [-]
If asked the question, most people would choose to, I believe.
CalRobert 23 hours ago [-]
They wouldn’t pay a nickel more for gas to save their own kid.
b112 19 hours ago [-]
You are a chipmunk. Every second is met with immense risk of predation, whether cat or hawk. Yet you must still seek food, mate, and water. You must "live in the moment", ignore future hypothetical dangers, and simply live.
You must be in your territory, defending it daily from others. You must live knowing the cat sleeps 50 feet away.
Future dangers must be misty, put out of mind, lest you become paralyized with fear and inaction. To be concerned for unimmediate danger, is impossible.
We are descended from such.
Humans have a very limited capacity to be concerned too far in the future. And think, if we were, how the probabilities expand that danger the further out you go.
Then also understand that the average IQ is 100, and consider how many are below that.
So, as a chipmunk do you work diligently collecting nuts for your winter, and your family? Or do you give up some nuts for a future that is misty, distant, opaque?
Don't be too hard on people, they're only human. They're only, really, chipmunks with bigger brains. And many are trying.
CalRobert 7 hours ago [-]
I get you but I think most people are really very selfish when the negative externalities of their actions are diffuse. You don’t see an individual your actions harm, but the harm is real.
b112 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, and that's just another form of distant danger.
And the premise is the same. If you could empathize with every person, very directly, you'd be immensely depressed. Imagine if you could literally feel the pain of every human in agony. Heck, imagine if you could feel the pain of every being in the universe. How would you not sink into a deep depression? How would you not fear every move you make?
If you felt every person dying this minute in a car crash, would you ever climb in a car? Would you even leave your house, if you felt every person who tripped and fell on stairs?
Danger must be diffuse. Empathy must exist, but also must have bounds. Just as we must be aware of the future (store food for the winter), and cannot let that drive be interfered with by distant, non-crystallized danger from the future, we cannot let empathy overwhelm our capacity to empathize beings in our immediate mental space.
By the way, this isn't saying we don't need to act. We do. However, understanding the motives behind how people behave, why they do so, and what drives them is important.
And this behaviour is quite important still. We have a massive industry around farming, for example, canning, this sort of thing. However with the further and further collapse of international shipping, and with the US withdrawing (over the last 20 years) from patrolling the world's waterways for free, shipping danger is slowly increasing as time goes on.
And of course shipping is a larger and larger concern in terms of environmental impact. Ships currently use the dirtiest, foulest, most horrid oil you can find. We've already switched to cleaning that up a bit (with perhaps unforeseen outcomes), but the entire concept of shipping massive quantities of "stuff" around is somewhat silly from an energy and environmental concern.
So we're going to slowly be moving back to local first, and that means canned food. Frozen food, such as vegetables, isn't tenable if you have to freeze them in August, and keep them frozen until June next year, at first crop.
We already have a lot of canned food, but my point is, the concept of 'manage your own food supply' is going to be a growing concern. And there was a time, a mere 100+ years ago, where most of the planet had to can their own food, and if a community ran out? Well, that was it, there was nothing to eat.
My point is, the concept of immediate danger must always supersede distant/diffuse danger.
Keep that in mind, and a lot more traction can be had.
Does it solve all the problems? No. But if you know the why of a thing, you're closer to solving the thing.
mulmen 15 hours ago [-]
But you’re not a chipmunk.
hackable_sand 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gilrain 1 days ago [-]
…while not changing anything about our behavior, you mean. Because we were never ignorant of how to do better; we just couldn’t accept even any inconvenience, any obstacle to our “growth”.
AlecSchueler 18 hours ago [-]
I'm well aware! Not only are we unable to change our behaviour we in fact have the hubris to imagine that if we could only use our technology to communicate with the whales that it would be enough to say
> "Don't go to these places—even though you want to, even though your family has been breeding there for generations—because that's our special whale hunting area"
And that their behaviour would change for us, that their response would simply be:
> "No worries, thanks for the heads up! Sorry for getting in the way of your harpoons"
SapporoChris 15 hours ago [-]
DolphinGemma at this point hasn't accomplished much. If they had anything groundbreaking they probably would mention it on their page. But instead it's filled with many hopeful statements. https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/dolphingemma/
No it isn't and that clickbait article doesn't say it is.
dmos62 1 days ago [-]
What makes it a clickbait article?
>There is a federal law that prohibits people from communicating with dolphins.
>It’s called the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Signed in 1972 by President Richard Nixon, the federal law was created to protect marine mammals from being hunted, harassed, captured or killed.
>In a sense, talking to or communicating with dolphins could qualify as harassment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
>There are two levels of harassment, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Harassment at one level is considered “any act of pursuit, torment, or annoyance that has the potential to injure a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild.”
>On another level, harassment is defined by the NOAA as “acts having the potential to disturb (but not injure) a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild by disrupting behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to, migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering.”
tclancy 1 days ago [-]
It’s going to be prog rock, isn’t it?
parpfish 1 days ago [-]
no, i think they're just going to start a podcast.
tclancy 1 days ago [-]
Yes officer, this one right here.
1 days ago [-]
naruhodo 1 days ago [-]
Not necessarily. Look at the Gorillaz.
The_Blade 1 days ago [-]
Migaloo is joining Humphrey the Whale's team in SF forming a super team
_joel 1 days ago [-]
The water goes all the way up to 11
redact207 1 days ago [-]
their music's making waves
astrocat 1 days ago [-]
holy units batman
> Bursting from their enormous lungs at over 300mph (483km/h), a humpback whale's blow can rise up to 7m (23ft) into the air.
Pick a lane BBC.
But this is great news. Also the fact that whales "transport huge amounts of nutrients across the globe" (linking to [1]) is fascinating. The role of whales in sucking up critters in one place and pooping them out elsewhere being a fundamental dynamic that drives global ocean ecosystems... just chefs kiss
It's not just the BBC, it's the UK as a whole. Miles per hour or deeply entrenched for speeds but for measurements we use meters. The same for weight, we weigh people in stone but we weigh everything else with grams.
Oarch 1 days ago [-]
We even weigh different kinds of drugs differently. So I'm told.
AlecSchueler 19 hours ago [-]
Always found it funny that cannabis in small amounts was sold in grams but later quantities in ounces.
frereubu 1 days ago [-]
I remember reading about whales returning to an area they hadn't been in for decades and people were worried about them eating all the local fish, but in fact their faeces enriched the local ecosystem from the ground up, leading to more fish. It's a bit like the counter-arguments to the lump of labour fallacy.
phatfish 21 hours ago [-]
How we measure things in the UK has been dragged into political debates (Boris floated the idea of forcing supermarkets to list weights in pounds and ounces "again"). So critical thinking or sane decisions are out the window on this front.
Although there is some logic to keeping miles per hour for road speed limits as there is a big cost associated with updating all the signs and associated "documentation".
An organisation like the BBC have to make sure to use imperial measures (as well the one most people actually interact with), otherwise Reform voters have a meltdown.
mr_toad 15 hours ago [-]
It’s not cost, it’s culture. Nearly every other country, including the vast majority of the commonwealth has managed to convert to metric distance. The UK and the US look like geriatric reactionaries, who refuse to change, not because they can’t, but because they won’t.
tom_ 1 days ago [-]
I think the BBC policy is to provide every measurement in both types of unit.
gamerslexus 1 days ago [-]
Ordering is inconsistent.
CarVac 1 days ago [-]
They use MPH in the UK.
aaronbrethorst 1 days ago [-]
Their hours are pegged to the hogshead, and are about 3 seconds shorter than American hours.
lostlogin 1 days ago [-]
The US use of units is worse than the UK.
Said from a proudly metric country, New Zealand, where everyone knows their weight in kilograms and height in feet and inches.
NooneAtAll3 1 days ago [-]
at least it's not stones
mr_toad 15 hours ago [-]
My parents used to measure us in feet and stones. I still know my height in feet, because it hasn’t changed in decades. My weight, unfortunately, I could only tell you in kilograms.
The_Blade 1 days ago [-]
The metric system is the tool of the Devil! My Tesla gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!
aaronbrethorst 20 hours ago [-]
Gimme five bees for a quarter you’d say!
redsocksfan45 1 days ago [-]
Is it also their policy to botch the significant digits? 300 mph is obviously a crude estimate. Converting to 483 km/h implies an unreasonable degree of precision.
cyberax 1 days ago [-]
Apparently they also measurably affect the vertical water mixing. Fish need dissolved oxygen to breathe, so they don't normally venture past the thermocline. And their fins are also vertical, so they don't cause a lot of vertical water movement.
But whales routinely dive deep, and their tail fin is _horizontal_ and it creates powerful updrafts.
Another organism that affects mixing is apparently jellyfish.
1 days ago [-]
xhkkffbf 23 hours ago [-]
Animals do these things. Bears eat berries and then poop out the seeds, complete with fertilizer. It happens up and down the food chain.
1 days ago [-]
dotspec 1 days ago [-]
It's the Entmoot of the sea.
ourmandave 1 days ago [-]
Alright, who pissed off Aquaman this time?
AFF87 23 hours ago [-]
What do the dolphins think about it?
kemiller 18 hours ago [-]
Looking forward to their first album dropping.
arnavpraneet 18 hours ago [-]
Witty!
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
They may gather up for a protest. See the whale north of Germany who seems unable to swim away.
stef25 1 days ago [-]
He got away eventually right ?
kunley 1 days ago [-]
They are going to save us from that XXIII century probe, right
But where does such information originate from? Is laypeople just making it up?
We have no real frame of reference for what we've already lost.
No it hasn't, this is climate change denialist nonsense. In fact no less a figure than ExxonMobil correctly predicted the trajectory of global CO2 levels and corresponding increase in warming as far back as the 1970s and their predictions remain accurate today.
No it hasn't.
micro-plastics into the ocean don't have a good prognosis on numbers reduction
global warming has a huge effect on oceanic life
and so on. maybe the number is much worse
Right. Just because some predictions weren’t accurate, doesn’t mean they were directionally inaccurate. You biodiversity and total volume of plant/animal/marine biomass that’s not human or commercially consumed by humans has depleted in the last 50 years and it only accelerates every year. There objectively will be fewer whales, if any in 50 years. Life as we know is ending and has been for decades.
Fear is a strong motivator, but it is not a good one in this case. To really be effective, there must be the threat of direct, immediate, and severe consequences.
Instead it causes people to treat their messages as hyperbolic and undermines their entire movement.
Simple thought exercise (it's a 2x2):
What are the consequences of climate change being consequential vs inconsequential?
What are the consequences of us doing too little or too much to mitigate climate change?
Which quadrants are most consequential for the future of our planet?
Furthermore, most actions we can take to improve climate outcomes can also improve societal and technological outcomes. The only downside to taking more actions to have clean energy and less pollution are based on made up economic rules that normal people are supposed to follow, but that the super rich/powerful skirt at their leisure. A cleaner future benefits the VAST majority, irrespective of climate change. And the bonus is that if climate change does progress, we're better suited to manage it.
Or we can keep burning liquified dinosaur bones and partying like cigarettes don't cause cancer. I get the appeal of the 60s for how care free people could be - they lived without consequence. And we're stuck dealing with their failed policies.
> liquified dinosaur bones
I know this is a nice factoid that does not need to be true. When I was 13 I did believed it, so now days I try to not spread this factoid. We can talk about the fascinating history of millions of years of efficient carbon storage on our planet.
I took it as sarcasm.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory>
Whale lifespans are long, populations and fecundity / brood sizes are small, sexual maturity relatively late, and childhood mortality relatively high. All of these make for slower rather than more rapid evolution.
Species such as krill (on which many whales feed) are far more likely to evolve rapidly in the face of increasing selection pressures. Whales might well find themselves boxed into an inescapable evolutionary corner.
The food chain really is sun -> algae -> krill (and sometimes small fish) -> humpback whale
But they don’t eat large fish, squid regularly, or anything like seals - so they’re not “generalists” in the broad, anything-goes sense.
They’re still constrained by their baleen filter-feeding system, which limits them to tiny prey
Lots of things eat krill and small fish. They're near the bottom of the foodchain too. In addition to algae, krill are opportunistic omnivores who often consume detritus. But their primary diet is algae. Small fish tend to be pretty similar.
It's not that other things don't interact with algae or krill or small fish, it's that those groups are the foundation bedrock of the ocean ecology. And single celled organisms like algae are tough as nails in aggregate. Couldn't kill them all if we tried. Pool owners will be familiar with the struggle.
A perfect example of this is when sea otters were nearly hunted to extinction which caused sea urchins to flourish which caused the death of coral and coastal environments which started to affect the larger things that depended on those environments.
My point is that any change to the careful balance can have non-linear effects.
Like what? Emotional support dolphin?
But seriously, we may not have much choice. Natural evolution stopped being able to adapt to environmental changes after it created us; genetic engineering is essentially the only way to make biology adaptable enough again.
But since we humans are pretty arrogant with our wisdom and lack long term patience, I can see many ways where well-intended meddling can end up in catastrophe overall.
https://www.projectceti.org/
The same goes for most of our ecological problems, really.
You must be in your territory, defending it daily from others. You must live knowing the cat sleeps 50 feet away.
Future dangers must be misty, put out of mind, lest you become paralyized with fear and inaction. To be concerned for unimmediate danger, is impossible.
We are descended from such.
Humans have a very limited capacity to be concerned too far in the future. And think, if we were, how the probabilities expand that danger the further out you go.
Then also understand that the average IQ is 100, and consider how many are below that.
So, as a chipmunk do you work diligently collecting nuts for your winter, and your family? Or do you give up some nuts for a future that is misty, distant, opaque?
Don't be too hard on people, they're only human. They're only, really, chipmunks with bigger brains. And many are trying.
And the premise is the same. If you could empathize with every person, very directly, you'd be immensely depressed. Imagine if you could literally feel the pain of every human in agony. Heck, imagine if you could feel the pain of every being in the universe. How would you not sink into a deep depression? How would you not fear every move you make?
If you felt every person dying this minute in a car crash, would you ever climb in a car? Would you even leave your house, if you felt every person who tripped and fell on stairs?
Danger must be diffuse. Empathy must exist, but also must have bounds. Just as we must be aware of the future (store food for the winter), and cannot let that drive be interfered with by distant, non-crystallized danger from the future, we cannot let empathy overwhelm our capacity to empathize beings in our immediate mental space.
By the way, this isn't saying we don't need to act. We do. However, understanding the motives behind how people behave, why they do so, and what drives them is important.
And this behaviour is quite important still. We have a massive industry around farming, for example, canning, this sort of thing. However with the further and further collapse of international shipping, and with the US withdrawing (over the last 20 years) from patrolling the world's waterways for free, shipping danger is slowly increasing as time goes on.
And of course shipping is a larger and larger concern in terms of environmental impact. Ships currently use the dirtiest, foulest, most horrid oil you can find. We've already switched to cleaning that up a bit (with perhaps unforeseen outcomes), but the entire concept of shipping massive quantities of "stuff" around is somewhat silly from an energy and environmental concern.
So we're going to slowly be moving back to local first, and that means canned food. Frozen food, such as vegetables, isn't tenable if you have to freeze them in August, and keep them frozen until June next year, at first crop.
We already have a lot of canned food, but my point is, the concept of 'manage your own food supply' is going to be a growing concern. And there was a time, a mere 100+ years ago, where most of the planet had to can their own food, and if a community ran out? Well, that was it, there was nothing to eat.
My point is, the concept of immediate danger must always supersede distant/diffuse danger.
Keep that in mind, and a lot more traction can be had.
Does it solve all the problems? No. But if you know the why of a thing, you're closer to solving the thing.
> "Don't go to these places—even though you want to, even though your family has been breeding there for generations—because that's our special whale hunting area"
And that their behaviour would change for us, that their response would simply be:
> "No worries, thanks for the heads up! Sorry for getting in the way of your harpoons"
>There is a federal law that prohibits people from communicating with dolphins.
>It’s called the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Signed in 1972 by President Richard Nixon, the federal law was created to protect marine mammals from being hunted, harassed, captured or killed.
>In a sense, talking to or communicating with dolphins could qualify as harassment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
>There are two levels of harassment, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Harassment at one level is considered “any act of pursuit, torment, or annoyance that has the potential to injure a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild.”
>On another level, harassment is defined by the NOAA as “acts having the potential to disturb (but not injure) a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild by disrupting behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to, migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering.”
> Bursting from their enormous lungs at over 300mph (483km/h), a humpback whale's blow can rise up to 7m (23ft) into the air.
Pick a lane BBC.
But this is great news. Also the fact that whales "transport huge amounts of nutrients across the globe" (linking to [1]) is fascinating. The role of whales in sucking up critters in one place and pooping them out elsewhere being a fundamental dynamic that drives global ocean ecosystems... just chefs kiss
[1] https://www.nature.com/research-intelligence/nri-topic-summa...)
Although there is some logic to keeping miles per hour for road speed limits as there is a big cost associated with updating all the signs and associated "documentation".
An organisation like the BBC have to make sure to use imperial measures (as well the one most people actually interact with), otherwise Reform voters have a meltdown.
Said from a proudly metric country, New Zealand, where everyone knows their weight in kilograms and height in feet and inches.
But whales routinely dive deep, and their tail fin is _horizontal_ and it creates powerful updrafts.
Another organism that affects mixing is apparently jellyfish.
Sorry. I couldn’t resist.
For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_progressive_rock_super...