Based on the title, I expected an article about the habits of super wealthy gamblers, and was pleasantly surprised to find out it is about actual whales. Nice.
It's funny, your comment reminds me of one of the first comments i ever made on HN that got highly upvoted.
I made the opposite mistake, read the headline, assumed it was about actual whales, didn't read the article before posting then went off on some tangent about whale watching and tourism.
Turns out it was an article about big spending gamblers in video games.
Naturally enough, I assumed this was going to be about that again until i seen your comment.
I hear you, I thought the same. Are you trading by any chance? Your handle suggests so. I see those whales as massive concentrations of wealth whose action is directly seen on the charts, e.g when they buy/sell the stock price rises/drops with them
I agree. In most industries (finance, mobile gaming, gambling) where "Whales" are common, their presence certainly leads companies competing for their attention (read: money) to very perverse incentives.
Nature really is wonderful is so many ways. The harvesting of ocean life really seems to be one of the things the world has made great strides towards better management in the past 100 years, yet there seems to be so many pressing issues.
Ocean wildlife stock has dropped dramatically in the last 100 years and continues to drop as we scrape everything we can out of it. The future looks bleak in this regard.
Extra-terrestial colonization appears to me to be one of the few avenues of human civilizational expansion that is positive sum for all lifeforms. We could grow our food in what are now lifeless surfaces, thus reducing the stress we impose on natural habitats, while massively expanding how much we produce.
Because Earth-based civilization relies on the commons, and it's hard to manage the commons, due to the vast number of competing claims on them. i.e. the tragedy of the commons.
Extra-terrestial colonization would be completely different, with entirely self-contained environments owned by defined parties who are incentivized to effectively manage them.
The other point is that extra-terrestial colonization could give us access to vastly more resources, that can be harnessed without putting any strain on natural environments. It could even be possible to return all Earth-based agricultural lands to their natural state, and grow all the food we need in urban vertical farms that receive the energy they need for plant growth from extra-terrestial sources like space-based solar panels.
They are worse recently, but some good things were done in the 20th century. Fisheries have been overfished for much of human civilization and we have recovered some of those. We are better at enforcing regulations and willing to enact new ones, though doubtless there are still problems.
Whaling protections have been put in place and despite several offenders the situation is better than it was 100-200 years ago.
Whaling peaked at 1960s and was banned only in 1986. We have done some good in the past 20-30 years, yes, but at least 2/3rds of 20th century were pretty bleak, and situation at the end of 20th century definitely was lot worse than what it was 200 years ago.
I know whaling has strong cultural connotations to 19th century, through Moby Dick and such, but that was really just very small scale childs play compared to 20th century stuff.
Fishing has even bleaker situation. From 1950s we have gone from about 20 million tonnes yearly capture production to about 80 million tonnes in 1990s, and stayed at that level since. The sort of devastatingly massive factory ships we operate these days simply did not exist before. I guess the only good thing that can be said is that the total global catch growth has stopped?
I'd like to make a book recommendation. The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina. When I read this 12 months ago, I felt it was one of the most powerful accounts of the pillages still occurring in the world's oceans, as well as the horrific conditions many fishermen are forced to live in. I won't link to Amazon, but here is a review of the book: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/02/the-outlaw-oce...
> "I very gently approached, just breath-hold diving, swam down. She saw me and then actually closed her eyes. I mean, she was so relaxed that I could enter into that world. I was being allowed into her world and could make these pictures."
Free-diving with minimal equipment sounds like the best way to earn trust from long-lived non-human people who, I like to think, have a rich oral history. I reckon they have significant generational trauma. One of my daydreams is that we learn to understand some cetacean languages. Know anyone working on that?
Thanks for sharing that article. Reading that awhile back contributed to my interest in “non-destructive testing” on animals, or rather, learning through observation and safer, more-ethical interaction. Learning dolphin languages rather than imposing ours feels better, and if we go into it thinking beyond our own lifetimes we might reduce ego and ecological disruption, and be more patient. Too often we investigate on our terms, in our controlled settings, rather than going to their natural environment. We do this to ourselves, to, with IQ tests and other standardized tests that value X over Y, when Y might be something my culture reasonably valued as intelligent.
That article just keeps escalating, what an unreal read.
Living with a dolphin in the same room for 6 days a week, trying to teach it English, letting him release its sexual urges on the researcher, injecting it with lsd and then after the experiment was over he commits suicide by drowning himself which apparently dolphins can do.
An utterly bizarre and twisted story that yet somehow feels wholesome?
I think you can feel empathy for the researcher and dolphin involved, but it isn’t wholesome; the experiment was traumatic and kind of insane. However, you can see that the caretaker really did try to do her best for Peter.
Fair point, I certainly don't endorse something like this happening again. It was more the human/dolphin friendship and bonding that led me to that conclusion.
The concept of human/animal communication is an interesting field when it doesn't involve abuse.
> One of my daydreams is that we learn to understand some cetacean languages.
Me too!
I sometimes think about the devices described in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos that enabled the wearer to talk to dolphins on the planet Maui-Covenant[0].
I am sure this is possible today, using a library of recorded dolphin sounds and perhaps also movements, environmental conditions and apparent stimuli to train a neural net that can infer meaning.
I did find this article from 2011 about a future test of a dolphin communication device [1].
> Maui-Covenant's original human settlers lived on a beautiful ocean world whose most notable features were the motile isles which migrate to the equator every summer. The isles were herded by dolphins saved from extinction during Old Earth's final years.[0]
Good reason to take care for the dolphins now, eh? Science fiction is great for reflecting, and for exploring what might be, to help guide us into the future. And it can just be fun, of course.
Caring for another group can have long-term benefits (but is not the primary reason to do kind things, I feel), a recent example of which is the many Irish people who donated to the Navajo COVID-19 Relief Fund[1]. Blindboy (from Limerick, Ireland) on his podcast remembers his dad telling him the Chocktaw gave money to the Irish during the famine in the 1800s.[2]
Curious, I looked and found numerous articles about this, including [3].
Reminds me of The Great Silence by Ted Chiang, a short story written from the point of view of a parrot inhabiting the tropical forests of costa Rica :
"The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they've created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.
But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren't they interested in listening to our voices?
We're a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren't we exactly what humans are looking for?"
I've not read the article, but this came into my inbox today, which you might be interested in. An in-depth look at Project CETI, a research effort that seeks to use AI to understand the vocalizations of sperm whales off the coast of Dominica.
I followed the link for the article, but the photos are just stunning I thought. Anyone know how much post processing is typically done on this kind of (underwater) wildlife image?
Not as much as you might imagine. White balance correction, some exposure compensation in the shadows, some sharpening. No overt pixel shifting/manipulation. Brian Skerry is an excellent photographer and knows how to make these types of images better than nearly anyone else alive.
This doesn't have anything directly to do with the specific topic, which is the culture of whales. Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents.
On HN we're interested in the diffs [1]: what's specifically interesting about an article. Generic tangents pull threads away from that into the gravitational field of the nearest large topic, sort of like a spaceship flying too close to a black hole [2]. The generic topics are larger, more familiar, and more repetitive [3]. Familiarity is seductive, but repetition is bad for curiosity [4], and curiosity is what we're trying to optimize for [5]. The generic themes are usually more sensational and inflammatory, too, which is doubly not what we're looking for.
It's super tempting for threads to hop to the most-generic adjacent orbit. Often they make several such hops. By the time a discussion reaches "People are cruel", that's a good example of a black hole. No light is going to come out of such a thread.
p.s. Not saying the generic topics aren't important in society at large. They're usually much more important than most of what's on topic here. But a site like HN needs to stick to what it's for.
To follow up with that, we are exceptionally cruel through our factory farms (CAFO) which subject animals to conditions that would put you into federal jail for years if you did it to a dog.
I strongly encourage everyone to consume less meat (because individual actions matter - the market is responsive/elastic and fewer animals will experience torture in the future if you purchase less animal products).
Any introduction to chaos theory should change your mind, but it convinces you that your actions have consequences at the cost of never being sure what they are.
There are people who have tried to investigate this thoroughly. My understanding is that there is a direct correlation between your actions an the supply.
> "If someone gives up 1 lb of chicken, total consumption falls by 0.76lb in expectation."
The mechanism is simple: if the stores are 100% responsive to your demand, your purchase directly affects supply. If they are not 100% perfect, they still have a mechanism through which they buy in bulk. So, roughly speaking, you might have a 1% chance of triggering a batch order for an extra 100 lbs when you purchase 1 lb of meat. And the same goes up the supply chain.
I'm usually of the same mind, but this is one scenario where individual action actually can help. For example, driving less won't significantly affect climate change even if most people do it, since the biggest contributors are industrial processes.
On the other hand, nearly all of the animal cruelty from factory farms stems from people buying meat from them. So if most people eat less meat, then factory farms actually will suffer.
Maybe hang out with some cows, pigs, sheep, lambs etc for a lil while. I don't mean in a mass farm with 1000s. In a place where there are one or 2 you can get to know as individuals.
I'm lucky to be able to get almost all of my meat from local, pasture-only sources (no feeder lots or anything like that). There are alternatives to abstaining from meat. The more we support them, the more widely available they will become.
Given that > 99% of all meat consumed in the US comes from factory farms, it is currently not feasible for the vast majority of the US population to do what you are lucky to be able to do.
It's great to hear there are still farms that care about animal welfare, but it's a challenge with a race-to-the-bottom where profits are inversely proportional with animal welfare.
Specifically, there is a greater incentive to make consumers think that the animals have good welfare, than to actually implement the better welfare. Unless we have mandatory web-cameras on all factories, you're just going on trust of people (who have all the immense financial incentives to lie).
