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PsychologicalTear899 t1_j7w0fsz wrote

TLDR: Female orcas are helping their sons find more food, resulting in the sons possibly growing larger and stronger, thus becoming a more desirable mate, so the male can smash a ton of other females whose kids his mother doesn't even have to raise, so technically she directly gives herself more grandkids, although it's not working out well right now because the orca population is low and it would be better if that female orca had multiple kids herself instead of raising just 1 and waiting for grandkids.

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ebulient t1_j7w6pg6 wrote

Thanks for the summary, you the real MVP!

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Jellyfish-airballoon t1_j7wdjap wrote

Sounds like my ex boyfriend and his mom

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EthosPathosLegos t1_j7wxo30 wrote

Your ex's mom would feed him a lot of salmon?

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InGenAche t1_j7yj2zo wrote

Not OP but same. My mom would repeatedly headbutt sharks and shit until they stopped putting up a fight then rip open a flap on their stomachs so I could get to the yummy liver.

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FuzzleFairy t1_j7yvthp wrote

Hi ! Its rare to meet Orcas on the internet ! Ive had the stereotype yall dont have access to it. Have a good day and lots of yummy liver !

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sorrylilsis t1_j7x4cfk wrote

Orcas are jewish moms. It's confirmed.

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sercommander t1_j80kda8 wrote

I had a jewish girlfried. About a few months into the relationship I knew the struggles of being a jewish son and noped out right away. Too much mothering and control for me.

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sixgunbuddyguy t1_j7x24zg wrote

I'd be interested to see what the trend is for mixed sex children. Do they always stop having babies once there's a boy to take care of? What's the relationship between mom/daughter whales?

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[deleted] t1_j7wtre7 wrote

[deleted]

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Kaiser_Maxtech t1_j7wvw0z wrote

i feel like most gamers get fed more than enough though and thats the problem with these orcas.

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Ok-Hunt-5902 t1_j7wwq6i wrote

Maybe they were fed junk and that has played a part in their inability to thrive.

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Kaiser_Maxtech t1_j7wx87e wrote

im a fatass with zero personality who eats nothing but junk but turned out 6'8 and somehow managed to snag love and gain some amount of aspiration and knowledge out of it. If i can do it, an orca can do it better.

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Ok-Hunt-5902 t1_j7wzba2 wrote

Concerning the orcas, that’s really not the what the article concludes, from my understanding

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vinaymurlidhar t1_j7yrge3 wrote

Thats the spirit, the orca should pull itself by its orca bootstraps and reply on socialist maternal handouts.

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CheatsySnoops t1_j7wvcqm wrote

That's super depressing.

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Paradox_Dolphin t1_j7wxdoy wrote

It really is. Dolphins and whales are highly intelligent animals, and it's believed they have quite advanced speach. Makes me wonder if they talk about how the oceans aren't providing like they used to. Obviously, they'd have no concept of the fact that a hairless land ape was causing all of this destruction.

But I always wonder why dolphins help and protect humans. There's even records of dolphins helping humans from all the way back in ancient Greece.

And when we eventually translate dolphin language, will we admit that we're the ones causing their food supply problems?

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TricksterPriestJace t1_j7wzson wrote

We tried to share a language. The best translation we have of a dolphin phrase is "more handjobs please."

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djbuttplay t1_j7x0rsy wrote

They didn't mention the part where when they ended the experiment and the dolphin stopped getting jerked off he drowned himself at the bottom of his tank.

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80taylor t1_j7y8wm8 wrote

Is this true?

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washington_jefferson t1_j7yak9u wrote

Unfortunately. Here is a good Radiolab podcast: https://radiolab.org/episodes/home-where-your-dolphin

I asked ChatGPT and it said:

> You might be referring to the story of Margaret Howe Lovatt and the experiments she conducted with a bottlenose dolphin named Peter in the 1960s.

> Margaret Howe Lovatt was a researcher who worked with Peter, a captive bottlenose dolphin, as part of a NASA-funded project to explore the possibility of communication between humans and dolphins. The experiments took place on a small island in the Virgin Islands, where Lovatt lived and worked with Peter for several months.

> During the experiments, Peter became sexually aggressive towards Margaret Howe Lovatt, and she claims to have engaged in sexual contact with the dolphin as a way to appease him and maintain a calm and productive living environment for both of them. However, this behavior is considered highly controversial and unethical by the scientific community, and Lovatt has faced criticism for her actions.

> In the end, the experiments were unsuccessful and the project was eventually abandoned. Peter was eventually transferred to another facility, where he died several years later. The story of Margaret Howe Lovatt and Peter the dolphin continues to be a topic of interest and debate in the scientific community, and serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of crossing ethical boundaries in animal research.

So, basically an OG nottheonion story.

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Kazahaki t1_j80cs8y wrote

Looking forward to seeing/hearing people say "I asked ChatGPT and it said:" a lot more in the future lol

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washington_jefferson t1_j80y637 wrote

Yeah, it might get banned in some subs. One sub I frequent the most involves a lot of international law and domestic policies. ChatGPT makes it wayyyyy easier to help people. Before you had to use bullet points from referral references from Google searches, and now you can just tell ChatGPT to give its answers in bullet point form. The thing is- you have to ask it specific questions and tweak things, and you kind of already have to know the answer that you are asking about. It just saves you time explaining and citing things. If you need actual facts with more certainty you should use google, or ask chatgpt where it's getting it's sources.

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Wagsii t1_j7wyu3h wrote

The great Human/Dolphin War of 2300 creeps closer.

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diagnosedwolf t1_j7z3no7 wrote

> Obviously, they have no concept of the fact that a hairless land ape was causing all of this destruction

I wouldn’t be so sure of this. Whales are known to not only understand the impact humans have on their lives, they have changed intergeneral behaviour because of it.

There is a species of whale that used to sing loudly in the Arctic. It was heavily hunted in the 1800s, and thought to be extinct for a while in the 1900s because it wasn’t seen or heard for decades. Only when recording devices were left behind did the whales get “rediscovered”.

It turned out that the whales had straight-up learnt that humans were hunting them in boats, so they went quiet and hid when they perceived human presence. They taught their children how to do this, and every generation since.

Studies with other species of whales showed that they can perceive the difference between a research boat and a whaling ship.

TLDR: whales understand an awful lot

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uzenik t1_j7za0ef wrote

So like african elephants that recognoze language that is used by tribes that hunt them, and those that don't.

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Paradox_Dolphin t1_j80voy9 wrote

Wow, animal intelligence never stops amazing me.

It is so sad to me that these animals are still hunted. I have this fantasy of working on a whaling ship, and just sabotaging it the entire time. Like, pour olive oil on the deck so people slip. Light nets on fire in the middle of the night. Just make it hell.

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laurel_laureate t1_j7x2fk0 wrote

It's believed? By who? Source on this? I'm genuinely curious.

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Paradox_Dolphin t1_j7x9j1t wrote

Cetacean Intelligence (there's a section for communication).

It's actually really cool too; Dolphins all have something that researchers call a "signature whistle," which seems very similar to the concept of humans each having a name. And the crazier thing is, for male dolphins, a part of their signature whistle will be taken from their mother's signature whistle, while female dolphins have completely original signature whistles. So this shows not only language, but also suggests culture.

Another awesome example; there are two dolphin species, one generally lives further north while the other lives further south, but they both reproduce around Hawaii. When they meet up around Hawaii, they hunt with each other. The two species generally have vocalizations and hearing abilities that are in a different frequency range, but their frequency ranges have some overlap. So when they hunt together, they switch to making sounds that are in a frequency range that they can both hear/vocalize in. So essentially, they're using a bridge language that neither typically speaks when they're separate.

This next study, I've sadly not heard any updates on, but this company is trying to use ML to translate dolphin language. (they were supposed to have finished the study in 2021, but I never heard more about it. Hoping COVID didn't wreck it.)

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BiPoLaRadiation t1_j7x3dh8 wrote

IE: the evolutionary trend towards k selection vs r selection in orcas is backfiring during the current mass extinction event that is putting excessive pressure on their population numbers. In times of extreme population stress and environmental decline, passing on genes is too uncertain even with large investment in offspring and so a lot of effort is wasted compared to producing more offspring but putting in less effort for each.

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Initial_E t1_j7x4brq wrote

Asking a woman to have more kids instead of fussing over the one they do have is like wading into a minefield.

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bubba7557 t1_j7xxsse wrote

My mother did not support this strategy at all. I was given the boot shortly after hs graduation by coming home from work one day to find a greasy smoking guy whitewashing my bedroom walls and telling me my mom had rented out my room to him, my stuff was in the garage. Orca moms need that greasy smoking guy

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ma2412 t1_j7yciga wrote

Wow, that's pretty shitty.

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bubba7557 t1_j7zjxrp wrote

Yeah it wasn't great. BUT I also was making some poor choices. I had turned down college scholarship offers and didn't apply to college because I didn't want to leave the city where my gf lived. Instead I'd gotten a job at a steel mill and was spending most of my time smoking weed and working. My mom's rationale was, you don't want to go to college fine, but I'm not paying for your housing. You have a job, go be a real man if you think that's the life you want. I did that for about a year and realized real work, real bills, real life was damn hard and I'd rather be back in college where it was reading books and parties even if it was far from that gf I had. So in a year I went back to college and my mom graciously began helping me with housing bills again so I could focus on school. A little bit of a harsh lesson but it pointed me where I needed to go. I just needed a year of being stubborn to figure that out myself.

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ma2412 t1_j7zkng9 wrote

Thank you for the context. I'm glad it worked out for you :-)

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bubba7557 t1_j7zmdd0 wrote

Believe me, I was pretty resentful at the time and I don't think I'd follow a similar strategy for my kids, but it worked out overall for me and I don't hate my mom for it. So I'd say it was a success in my case

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vNerdNeck t1_j7x41rl wrote

can you apply to take this persons job at NPR?

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Serikan t1_j7zrks7 wrote

So basically, mom is the wingman

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SomeVariousShift t1_j7y82rj wrote

We need to learn to speak orca so we can cooperate with them on better breeding strategies.

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Sryn t1_j7x1mbb wrote

I wanted to skim and my brain read ‘Female orcs …’

BTW Are there any female orcs in LOTR?

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Trachslee t1_j7x2mi9 wrote

According to J.R.R. Tolkien there are in fact female orcs. However, they are not seen in battle. Now I imagine an orc counterpart to Eowyn that desperately wants to be warrior and sneaks into battle.

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