#cetacean rights

[intersection-of-art-and-science]

“Bob Otis has been joining Wieland on the west side of San Juan Island for many of those watches. A quiet spoken, semi-retired college professor from wisconsin, Otis man's the whale watching operations inside the Lime Kiln State Park lighthouse, where a number of students and volunteers each summer monitor the comings and goings of Southern residents and other whales who happen past. The monitoring work includes listening in on the hydrophones that are plugged in off the rocky shore of the lighthouse.

Otis began this work in the 1990s as part of his work as an animal psychologist. But after a while, he says, it just became an old-fashioned passion: ‘Certainly when I started I came with all the baggage that a scientist brings in terms of quantification and objectivity. That has changed somewhat,’ he says. ‘Today when I teach a course on the killer whale, back in Wisconsin, I bring the students here,’ he says. ‘I want them to be able and willing to look at the killer whale through the eyes of a poet, a musician, an artist, as well as a scientist. I encourage my students to dabble in the arts, because it makes them much better scientists."

Excerpt from Of Orcas and Men by David Neiwert

#intersection of art and science #quotes #David Neiwart #Of Orcas and Men #orcas #ocean science #marine bio #marine biology #marine ecology #cetaceans #cetacean rights #science

[hussyknee]

This is, bar none, the funniest fucking completely unironic shit published by a legitimate news outlet:

In recent months, orcas in the waters off the Iberian Peninsula have taken to ramming boats. The animals have already sunk three this year and damaged several more. After one of the latest incidents, in which a catamaran lost both of its rudders, the boat’s captain suggested that the assailants have grown stealthier and more efficient: “Looks like they knew exactly what they are doing,” he said. Scientists have documented hundreds of orca-boat incidents off the Spanish-Portuguese coast since 2020, but news coverage of these attacks is blowing up right now, thanks in part to a creative new theory about why they’re happening: cetacean vengeance. Now that’s a story! “The orcas are doing this on purpose,” Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, told LiveScience last month. “Of course, we don’t know the origin or the motivation, but defensive behavior based on trauma, as the origin of all this, gains more strength for us every day.” López Fernandez, who co-authored a 2022 paper on human-orca interactions in the Strait of Gibraltar, speculates that a specific female, known to scientists as White Gladis, may have suffered a “critical moment of agony” at the hands of humans, attacked a boat in retaliation, and then taught other whales to do the same. Whatever the truth of this assertion, White Gladis and her kin have quickly ascended to folk-heroic status on the internet. “What the marine biologists are framing as revenge based on one traumatic experience may be a piece of a larger mobilization towards balance,” the poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs tweeted before referring to the killer whales as “revolutionary mother teachers.” Media figures and academics are expressing solidarity with their “orca comrades” and support for “orca saboteurs.” One widely circulating graphic shows a pod smashing a boat from below, above the words “JOIN THE ORCA UPRISING.” (You can even purchase it in sparkly sticker form.) Yet all of this fandom and projection tends to overlook important facts: First, these orcas are likely to be playing with the boats rather than attacking them, and second, if one insists on judging killer whales in human terms, it’s plain to see they aren’t heroes but sadistic jerks.

A shark wrote this.

The recent incidents, none of which has resulted in any injuries to humans, are simply the result of curiosity, Monika Wieland Shields, the co-director of the Orca Behavior Institute in Washington, told me. A juvenile may have started interacting in this way with boats, she said, and then its habit spread through the local community of killer whales. Such cultural trends have been observed before: In the Pacific Northwest, orcas have been playing with buoys and crab pots for years; in the late 1980s, one group of orcas there famously took to wearing salmon hats. Is ramming boats the new donning fish? Shields believes that theory makes more sense than López Fernandez’s appeal to orca trauma. White Gladis shows no physical evidence of injury or trauma, Shields told me, so any “critical moment of agony” is purely speculative. Also, humans have given orcas ample reason to retaliate for hundreds of years. We’ve invaded their waters, kidnapped their young, and murdered them in droves. And yet, there is not a single documented instance of orcas killing humans in the wild. Why would they react only now? And though recent events may fit the story of these orcas’ being anti-colonial warriors, you can’t just anthropomorphize animals selectively. What about all the other “evidence” we have of orcas’ cruelty, or even wickedness? Scientists say they hunt and slaughter sharks by the dozen, picking out the liver from each one and leaving the rest of the carcasses to rot uneaten. Orcas kill for sport. They push, drag, and spin around live prey, including sea turtles, seabirds, and sea lions. Some go so far as to risk beaching themselves in order to snag a baby seal—not to consume, but simply to torture it to death. Once you start applying human ethical standards to apex predators, things turn dark fast.

Oh no, they gleefully torment other animals for sport!! Does this species deserve to have any redeeming qualities???

Perhaps #orcauprising was inevitable. Humanity does have, after all, a long history of freighting cetaceans with higher meaning. Moby Dick is, among other things, a symbol of the sublime. The biblical whale—or is it a large fish?—that swallows Jonah is an instrument of divine retribution, a means of punishing the wicked in much the same way some have framed the boat-wrecking orcas. The whale 52 Blue, known as the loneliest whale in the world because she speaks in a frequency inaudible, or at least incomprehensible, to her brethren, has become a canvas for all shades of human sorrow and angst. Orcas in particular have long been objects of both fear and sympathy, in some cases with an explicitly anti-capitalist tint. The 1993 classic Free Willy centers on a conniving park owner’s scheme to profit off of the bond between a child and a young killer whale. And more recently, the 2013 documentary Blackfish chronicles SeaWorld’s real-life exploitation of captive orcas. The “orca uprising” narrative fits neatly into this lineage. In our present era of environmental catastrophe, Shields told me, it’s appealing to think that nature might fight back, that the villains get their just deserts. But projection and anthropomorphization are only shortcuts to a shallow sympathy. Orcas really are capable of intense grief; they are also capable of tormenting seal pups as a hobby. They are intelligent, emotionally complex creatures. But they are not us.

Someone paid this dude actual money to conclude that Orcas aren't human.

In conclusion:

#this is a White Gladis stan account sorry #I don't care if she's doing it for shits and giggles in fact that would be even better #support orca rights and orca wrongs #orca splatoon #the atlantic #capitalism #joining the war on orcas on the side of the orcas #yachts #orcas #marine life #ecology #marine animals #class war #eat the rich #anti capitalism #cetaceans #knee of huss

[orcinus-veterinarius]

sorry if this has already been asked/answered, but do you have any thoughts on the orcas that have been attacking boats? genuinley curious whats going on there behaviourly and paychologically

So it seems this unusual behavior started when the pod’s matriarch, known to researchers as Gladis, was struck and injured by a boat propeller. The most viable theory is that Gladis then lashed out in an act of extreme frustration. Subsequently, she either taught her offspring the same behavior or—more likely—they observed her and decided to try it out for themselves. Mimicry is a huge part of how intelligent, highly social cetaceans like killer whales learn.

Since most of the attacks are perpetrated by youngsters, I’m honestly chalking it up to kids being dumb. Orcas, especially as juveniles, are very playful and very destructive, and this is all a super fun game. Far less likely, but still possible I suppose, is that they now truly see the boats as threats and are neutralizing them.

As fun as the memes about the orca uprising have been, there is no malice or vengeance at work here. To claim so is blatant anthropomorphism (but hey, people anthropomorphizing killer whales, what else is new). Hopefully, the behavior dies down soon, before another orca is hurt by a propeller or, worse, humans decide to put an end to it.

Because if there’s one animal that practices revenge, it’s the human being.

#my ask box is filling up and I haven’t done a thing about it #because the rotation I’m on right now is crazy busy and stressful #but I figured I could answer this one quickly and it’s still a current event #orcas #killer whales #orca uprising #cetaceans #marine mammals #wildlife #animal behavior #answered asks #anonymous

[antiqueanimals]

Walt Disney's White Wilderness: Animals of the Arctic. By Robert Louvain and the Staff of the Walt Disney Studio. 1958.

Internet Archive

#marine life #mammals #cetaceans #whales #right whales #sperm whales #blue whales #humpback whales #fin whales #gray whales #beaked whales #orcas #narwhals #belugas #porpoises #bottlenose dolphins #common dolphins

[inatungulates]

Southern right whale Eubalaena australis

Observed by huntingforparadise

#Eubalaena australis #southern right whale #Cetacea #Balaenidae #cetacean #whale #Oceania #Australia #Western Australia #Indian Ocean #juvenile

[averysmallcetacean]

I really want to make some online friends so here are some things that I would enjoy chatting about :-

• cartoons

• crochet

• whales

• poetry (both reading and writing)

• chronicles of ancient darkness and pjo + hoo (book 4 of hoo is where i'm up to currently)

• judaism (I want to convert when i'm old enough (my parents are atheist and it would upset them if they knew))

There is probably some other stuff but that is all I can think of currently. I'm autistic (on waiting list) so i'm not always get a messaging people but i'll do my best.

Equally, if you aren't interested in any of those things, I did still like to talk about just general stuff (how you feel, how life is going, etc). I just really want to make friends.

Sorry if this comes across as weird

#self dx #autistic #self dx autistic #chronicles of ancient darkness #percy jackon and the olympians #heroes of olympus #coad #pjo #hoo #cartoons #amphibia #the owl house #bee and puppycat #the ghost and molly mcgee #race to the edge #supernatural academy #etc #my list goes on for ages #also movies like nimona and #the mitchells vs the machines #ooh #plus princess bride #cochet #cetaceans #whales #southern right whales #poetry #sorry for all the tages #online friends

[lady-bee-holmes]

Back by request with a new update on the whales, this time with this lad’s Final Ultimate Form!

The edging is done with size 11 glass seed beads. There’s two couched outlines and one picot edging. Needless to say, couching takes a very, very long time, lol 🐋

#I’m so thrilled by how these guys are turning out! #I still have one to finish up then I can seal their backs and then start the actual jacket #but the order of operations here was basically teal outline then picot edging then black outline #and the black outline plus the black thread plus couching is basically a visual nightmare to do because you can’t see anything lol #but I’m loving every second of these lads ❤️ #just a buzzing bee #embroidery #seed beads #beadwork #beaded embroidery #fabric art #thread art #cetacean #whale #humpack whale #uh more tags #yeah #oh right the important one #my art #there we go

[lizardsaredinosaurs]

D’ya have any floss I can borrow? Preferably the XXXXL kind?

North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis)

North Atlantic Ocean

Status: Critically Endangered

Threats: historic hunting, ship strikes, fishing gear entanglement, climate change

Bonus full size->

#whale #right whale #ocean #marine mammals #whale weekly #endangered species #ocean art #mammal #cetacean #atlantic ocean

[veganpropaganda]

empty the tanks international is may 13th-14th this year, here's a list of events taking place around the world

#anti captivity #emptythetanks #animal rights #animal liberation #cetacean captivity #vegan #veganism

[aurosoulart]

I don't know anything about Beam Saber but please infodump about your dolphin

FINALLY ANSWERING THIS BECAUSE I HAVE THE ENERGY LETS GOOOOO. I uh.... am Really Into this character rn and actually properly infodumped here so it's under a readmore 🐬🐬🐬

ok so Sunlith is a second-generation uplifted bottlenose dolphin. that means that his parents were born in Ocean (the cetacean name for Earth), but they pursued the Uplift process, which changes parts of cetacean biology to make them more suited to life on land/in space/with humans/etc. (I can go into detail about what actually happens during Uplift but that would be its own post. 👀)

anyways! his parents went to space and Sunlith was born among a nomad fleet of stardrifters (another dolphin word for spaceship) in the outer solar system.

uplifted dolphins make up less than 1% of the Sol Union (the name for all space-faring beings from the Sol system), but they still have all the same rights and freedoms as humans... and particularly ambitious dolphins can make a killing as mineral extractors in the asteroid belt due to their exceptional piloting abilities. (cetaceans are naturals at maneuvering in low/no gravity 360 dregree space)

this was the profession of Sunlith's birth pod, meaning he grew up with the finest education available. this education allowed him to get into the Europan piloting division, which is especially sought after by cetaceans due to the fact that the best anti-grav exopods (mobility devices worn by cetaceans) come from Europan technology.

Sunlith wanted to go to Europa for a couple reasons: as a second-gen uplift, he's behind his peers in terms of fitting in with humans and other more culturally-adapted cetaceans. he uses traditional cetacean terms like 'maker' for humans and 'many-arms' for cephalopods (his favorite area of study.) basically, he's socially awkward and just wants to study tentacled creatures all day.

Europa is the only other planet in the solar system with native life forms - and they're possibly intelligent! they're called Nautilids and are convergently evolved with Ocean nautilus. by getting accepted as a frame pilot on Europa, Sunlith could both study his favorite organisms AND gain cultural prestige.

there was only one catch - the work on Europa is (you guessed it) mineral extraction! all Europan tech utilizes Europite, a rare metal only occurring on its namesake, for its coveted anti-gravity properties. the Nautilids on Europa are protected, but these protections are only enforced under a trade agreement with a hyper-advanced alien species called the Ouro. these aliens provide funding and equipment for non-invasive mining techniques in return for a cut of the Europite.

this finally brings us to the reason this is a Beam Saber campaign in a war setting: the Ouro are threatening embargo with the Sol Union because they want access to the human-inhabited extra-solar planet of Terra Brea, and these humans refuse to relocate. embargo would not only see Nautilid protections stripped away, but also a massive reversal of technological progress across the entire solar system.

and this is why Sunlith Joins The Peacekeepers (AKA the war. there is not much peace happening)... or, it's one of the reasons anyways. the population of Terra Brea is a religious sect called the Clusterists, a xenophobic group who don't take too kindly to dolphins. so that's also part of it. the Clusterists have their own stuff going on, the war is extremely unpopular, and it's messy and complicated!

I've REALLY been enjoying developing not only all the space-faring cetacean worldbuilding aspects of this universe, but also the whole fallout of an idealistic dolphin trying to fight for a cause he believes in only to discover that War Is Hell. he's VERY useful as a soldier because dolphins have higher psychic ability than humans, and he's used as a lie detector. his frame (mech) is also huge and has advanced shielding, since it was originally used for mining, moving ice sheets, and protecting Nautilids from harm.

to wrap up: Sunlith is very good at what's being asked of him. his call sign is 'Loyal' because of how his teammates view him as an order-following machine, but as he learns about human culture he's starting to hate his life more and more... but he still just wants to protect his little* squid friends and is experiencing extreme moral crisis.

will he succeed in any of his goals?! who knows!! but I'm excited to find out.

*they are not little at all actually. their shells are the size of ferris wheels and their tentacles extend like 100ft

#auropost #sunlith #beam saber #my brain right now: FULL OF DOLPHINS 🐬🐬🐬🐬🐬 #thank u so much for this ask #PLEASE anyone else feel free to ask me questions about any of this #some things i will not be able to say cuz it's spoilers #but there are SO many non spoiler things i can talk about regarding sci fi dolphins and their intricate cultural adaptations #like about how different species adapted to human society differently! #and about how different cetacean religions were brought into space! #or about how inter-species sol union spaceships are designed!!! #and different exopod designs for different cetacean species fhdskghsk #it's been YEARS since i've had this much creative energy and it feels SO good to actually MAKE something again #as opposed to making stuff for other people since that's my job #however now i can use my job as an excuse to make 3d character designs for all of this #so i am just going full tilt into it and i am SO excited about it #atyk

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

Seeing some claims being made about diet being the reason for the gastric torsion that happened in Skyla and Ula at Loro Parque but like.... unless you know what the nutritional makeup of the herring fed in the herring diet was you cannot comment on this.

Basically saying that Ula was being fed a full fish diet before she got sick, which would be expected for her age, but claiming that because her condition was worse, it's because of the fish.

Sorry but you cannot make claims about an all herring diet being problematic when you have no idea what the nutritional content of the fish being fed out was. We do analysis on the fish we bring in to feed cetaceans and develop diets based on their nutritional content. Sometimes you get batches with higher fat content ect. So the vet has to design the diet accordingly.

Also yes facilities can be limited by finances and sourcing issues - especially during Covid, which is when these diets were fed. "Well, they shouldn't have done that." Isn't helpful. You don't know why those vet monitored diets were fed.

But no you cannot make those sort of inferences without being professionally involved with these animals and actually know what you're talking about. Also diet is really only one factor here. We don't even know exact risk factors for gastric torsion and bloat in dogs - which have been in our care for thousands of years.

You think you've cracked the code on a significantly data deficient marine mammal with a case study of 2 individuals of a species that's only been in human care being treated by vets for about 50 years by comparison???

#I know people are curious and they also want to share findings from the conference and put their own interpretations on it #but that does not give you the right to spread that sort of information #Especially considering that diet was said to be only one potential cause #also yes increasing a diet when an animal is struggling to keep food down keeps that animal from dehydrating #just. god damn. you are not a vet you cannot make these sort of claims. #cetacean welfare

[activatebutterflyshield]

Funguary day 12: dead man’s fingers! A bicolor black-and-white lady that resembles an hourglass dolphin with long fingers(?) and visible ribs(?). Based on the Xylaria polymorpha (photo below)

Photo credit to user Freekee on Wikimedia Commons

#funguary #funguary2024 #creature drawing #dont know why but cetaceans are on the mind right now

[enter-the-phantom]

“Toki was an inspiration to all who had the fortune to hear her story and especially to the Lummi nation that considered her family.”

…weren’t the Lummi on the forefront of the fight to free her?

The Miami Seaquarium daring to even mention an Indigenous nation whose sacred animal they have kidnapped, abused, neglected, and let die in a tiny concrete tank is perhaps the most laughably disturbing part of this whole charade. It stinks of performative allyship and it stinks of racism.

It just stinks.

#this hit me like a truck when I read those words and I could not believe #the sheer audacity #animal rights #cetaceans #tokitae #anti captivity #empty the tanks

[orcinus-veterinarius]

Well everyone, I performed my first ever cetacean ultrasound today!

My “patient” is in excellent health, and this session was meant merely as practice both for me and for her—ensuring she remains comfortable holding still for scans. Because whales and dolphins are too big for manual palpation or x-rays, ultrasound is how veterinarians visualize their internal organs and ensure they remain healthy. Cetaceans in human care routinely receive ultrasound scans to monitor their health, even if they are not ill or pregnant.

And it’s a great example of cooperative care! Unlike dogs and cats, which have to be sedated or manually restrained by humans in order to get diagnostic ultrasound images, cetaceans in human care are trained to float in place while the veterinarian places the ultrasound probe on them. They are free to leave the session at any time. And there’s no need for ultrasound gel, because the water acts in its place!

(Photo not of me… published by Georgia Aquarium when their beluga Whisper was pregnant with her calf Shila)

All in all, a great end to my externship!

#very sad to leave… but I’m heading directly to my next externship tomorrow! #another aza facility with cetaceans #my third and final externship will actually be right after I graduate because I couldn’t fit it into my clinical year #whales #dolphins #belugas #orcas #cetaceans #marine mammals #animal training #animal husbandry #vet med #zoo med #aquatic med #vet school #vet student #externships

[antiqueanimals]

Drawing Sharks, Whales, Dolphins, and Seals. Written and illustrated by Paul Frame. 1983.

Internet Archive

#marine life #cetaceans #whales #right whales #Paul Frame

[inatungulates]

Southern right whale Eubalaena australis

Observed by pablof, CC BY-NC

#Eubalaena australis #southern right whale #Cetacea #Balaenidae #cetacean #whale #South America #Argentina #Atlantic Ocean #Golfo Nuevo