Orcas sink yachts: Is it revenge or playful behavior? Expert weighs in.

Comrade Willy

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
    255·
    3 months ago

    Because they know that if they kill anyone rich enough to afford a boat that some jackass will kill them back. So they keep it to property damage.

    • Zink@programming.dev
      51·
      3 months ago

      Shh, nobody tell the orcas how many humans get killed/ruined to protect property.

      • Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world
        15·
        3 months ago

        Not with that attitude.

        “Ohm’s law says that the current is voltage divided by resistance, so 110 volts / 2500 ohms gives 0.044 amps. At first, one might say that the orca would survive since that’s less than the fatal level of 0.1 amp. However, that level is easily enough to cause the muscles to contract violently, and if that condition persisted for more than a short time, it would kill by respiratory paralysis. (Again, assuming whale physiology is comparable to humans’.”

  • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
    61·
    3 months ago

    I thought they settled on juveniles playing. There are more now and food supply is better, so they have more time and that’s why it’s increasing.

    • Tudsamfa@lemmy.world
      4·
      3 months ago

      The ability to manipulate objects isn’t really that useful underwater, I feel, apart from being an unprecedented adaptation on the flipper and almost definitely coming at the cost of efficiency while swimming. Everything you want to mess around with as an orca can be transported with your mouth.

      Now, sonar loud enough to shatter human rib cages, that’s what’s going to be the next big step.

    • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
      7·
      3 months ago

      Yes Mr Sha, last name Moo, could you please sign on the dotted line? Next time you should think twice about swimming drunk.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
    664·
    3 months ago

    Last I heard, they’re bored and rudders are fun to play with.

    We need to give them some orca proof toys.

    • sudo@lemmy.today
      7·
      3 months ago

      These scientists say they don’t intend to sink the boats but they’re definitely doing it on porpoise.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          5025·
          3 months ago

          The word yacht doesn’t mean wealth,

          Yes, yes it does. It doesn’t mean ‘billionaire,’ but these aren’t subsistence fishermen we’re talking about here.

          It was a $128,000 yacht. If you don’t think people who can afford such a yacht are rich, you are one privileged person.

          • Cypher@lemmy.world
            113·
            3 months ago

            You’re literally attacking middle class people for having a small yacht.

            Your concept of wealthy is really skewed.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
              69·
              3 months ago

              “Middle class” and “small yacht.” Most middle class people can’t even afford a house. This is something that costs more than a luxury car.

              • Cypher@lemmy.world
                71·
                3 months ago

                Yea no one in the middle class can afford a house, a couple of cars and a small yacht.

                It’s impossible without having billions in the bank!

          • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            11·
            3 months ago

            TBH might have been a bunch of middle class retirees who sold the family home up in England for like 800k, bought something smaller for two to live in in Spain, and a small sailing boat. I don’t think about those people as “rich”.

              • smb@lemmy.mlEnglish
                2·
                3 months ago

                i consider statistics to be a good tool in general - but of course only if used correctly (as with any tool, like using a hammer when you have to drill a hole might create a hole but more repair work would be needed and the hole would likely neither be of correct shape nor stability then)

                so use the median to determine the middle, not the average. (because when A robs B everything he has, the average of what both have does not change a single quantum but poverty was increased, and that happens since invention of colonisation and other crimes a f***ing LOT and it did not stop yet)

                so determine the middle class by median of what ppl earn/have over the whole world. if you limit to anything smaller than the world, you’re manipulating by maybe favoring robbers, betrayers, murderers and enslavers, so use the whole world median or you end up with lies only.

                as i noted colonisation and slavery, the wealth that had build upon such, is in fact just part of (historic) debt.

                well lets see, where i am when i guess the worldwide wealth median.

                I do not live paycheck-to-paycheck any more for more than a decade, i own a 22year old economic car ( that does not look shiny but the mrchsnic says its secure), but i own no property and pay rent for a 60m2 flat where i live solo. thus i am rich. i neither feel safe financially nor feel rich, nor would i really know how to buy a house or a yacht, but compared to the majority of people on the world, i think i am to be considered rich. I can decide to buy smaller things from my monthly (40h/week) income without the need of thinking, that maybe most of worlds population (the median) would have to save money for in advance or would buy on debt. This alone more than often already is a luxury of the rich: “just buy it (if it does not ruin you)”. However, all of my “luxury” would not exist if i wouldn’t try to save money or be near to ‘nothing’ if i had any children to take care for. a generation ago it was possible to build a house, have a car, pay children, pay a bit extra for your non-working wife so she can go shopping AND go to holiday once a year in the expensive season together with the kids by only ONE person doing the same working hours per week as i do today. I do not see this even partly possible today and i do not feel rich enough to be able to finance a child. am i as poor as i am rich just because of how bad the world had beend changed since? maybe. i guess because of the “wealth transfer” to the rich (where i already “profit” a bit from, but also are ripped off by it) all humans on average(!) are more poor than one or two generations ago, while only a very small fraction of the world actually really profits from that transfer.

                The more wealth the rich accumulate, the more quickly they spread more poverty day by day, and the more instability in general is created too. This is what i genuinely believe. But where exactly do i stand in this scenario, comparing myself with the median that i only can imagine what it probably is while all measurements for how rich or poor i am i come up with seem really unusable today.

                The by far more easy way is to say “i am NOT rich”, point with the finger at someone else who is driving in his roaring and shiny luxury car to his private jet that will bring him to wherever his captain has maneuvered his billionaires yacht to just to jump into the water there. thats an easy view: the others are rich, but not me. this would be an easy view, but could it also be true? i guess not.

          • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
            262·
            3 months ago

            It was a $128,000 yacht. If you don’t think people who can afford such a yacht are rich, you are one privileged person.

            You’d be surprised how many people own a $128,000 yacht INSTEAD of a more-than-$128,000 house.

            (Of course, there are even more people who live aboard full-time on much-less-than-$128,000 yachts. For example, Sailing Uma probably have a bunch of money now 'cause they’re relatively successful Youtubers, but they started out spending only about $10k total (purchase + initial refit costs) for their 50-year-old, 36-foot boat. There’s an entire subculture of people doing basically nautical #vanlife, and they aren’t any richer than the homeless-by-conventional-standards people doing it on land.)

            • SeemsNormal@lemmy.world
              2·
              3 months ago

              I’ve met them, they fucked up someone else’s boat in the marina I was at, they didn’t offer to fix or help pay, they just bailed. They definitely fit into the asshole category, in my opinion.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
        14·
        3 months ago

        Well, a yacht is just a class of vessel. I think a lot of people are confusing them with LUXURY yachts which are way too big to be sunk by orchas.

        Here’s one for sale, $59,000. I could actually buy this, I mean, yeah, it’s from freakin’ 1984… but still.

      • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
        625·
        3 months ago

        I’m not. It’s only a matter of time before some rich asshole starts shooting at the whales, dropping sticks of dynamite or some equivalent callous and heartless thing. I don’t give two shits about the rich fucks, but I am highly concerned about the consequences to the whales. Humans, as a species, have no chill.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    154·
    3 months ago

    I wonder how practical it’d be to have an underwater sound emitter to repel one. The use of sonar gets sometimes criticized for its impact on whales. You’d think that you could take advantage of that.

    kagis

    Probably not powerful enough. Looks like military sonar pulls down a lot of power:

    https://www.quora.com/How-do-submarines-surface-ships-produce-such-loud-active-sonar-sound-emissions-from-their-transducers

    The first ship I was on used a sonar system from the ‘60s. The system used the maximum amount of power, just short of causing the transducer (an underwater combination speaker and microphone) array to cavitate (boil the water). As you go deeper, it takes more power to cavitate, so submarine sonars were even more powerful (but seldom used, to keep from advertising their location). Our system used 288,000 watts (A powerful home stereo may use 250 watts, so this is like 1000 home stereos all going at the same time!) When the power supply for the amplifiers malfunctioned, it often erupted fireballs across the room (Our Division Officer was so frightened, after seeing one, that he refused to enter the room, or even come down the stairs to the room’s door!). In addition, besides the raw power, the signal can be electronically focused to go in a single direction, much like the powerful spotlights used for advertising (car dealerships, for example). This makes the signal strong enough, that you can bounce it off the bottom of the ocean and detect a submarine more than 40 miles away.

    The sound is so loud, that you can hear it IN THE AIR while near a pier, when the ship was over 1,000 feet away (several city blocks). For a nearby diver in the water, it would extremely painful. In Vietnam, the ships in-port would run their sonars 24 hours a day, to keep enemy divers away from the ships.

    Inside the ship, you could hear it, no matter where you were below decks, even in noisy places. Most of the crew hated it. Sometimes, we (the sonarmen) would light-off the system, with the most powerful beam pointed at the rest of the ship, at 6:00 AM for Reveille (“Damned %&$ sonarmen! *%#$%^%$!!!”).