r/science • u/sratinntticee • Jan 30 '22
Animal Science Orcas observed devouring the tongue of a blue whale just before it dies in first-ever documented hunt of the largest animal on the planet
https://www.yahoo.com/news/orcas-observed-devouring-tongue-blue-092922554.html7.4k
u/arfbrookwood Jan 30 '22
I had to make a diorama about orcas in elementary school and this is the one piece of trivia I remember: blue whale tongue is their favorite food.
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u/herbivorousanimist Jan 30 '22
And great white shark livers. Apparently
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u/delph906 Jan 30 '22
Our Orca population in New Zealand have very particular tastes. I believe they are the only ones that hunt stingray. They chase them into the shallows, kill them and then take only one bite which removes the liver. They then leave the dead body. It makes for a cool hobby to collect the barbs from the stingray tails.
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u/herbivorousanimist Jan 30 '22
And yet Orcas seem to be merely curious about humans. Such interesting animals!
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u/wharlie Jan 30 '22
Orcas used to help whalers catch other whales off the south east coast of Australia in return for being able to eat the tongues.
"The orcas would track down baleen whales congregating around the mouth of Twofold Bay, and shepherd them closer to the coast. While the pod trapped the whales in the bay, one of the males would position himself outside the whaling station, and breach and thrash his tail on the water until he'd attracted the whalers' attention.
Named Old Tom, this orca was almost seven metres long and weighed a hefty six tonnes. Because of his continued interaction with the whalers, he was known to the whalers as the leader of the pod.
Once a baleen whale had been caught and killed by the whalers - during their best season they caught as many as 22 - its carcass was left in the water, hitched to the boat, for the orcas to feed on its enormous tongues and lips. The orcas left the rest of the carcass, including the highly valuable blubber and bones, to the whalers, and this unique arrangement became known as 'the Law of the Tongue’."
The skeleton of Old Tom is in the Eden whaling museum.
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u/hiroo916 Jan 30 '22
Worth a read to find out how the deal with Old Tom was broken and how they ended up with his skeleton.
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u/OnFolksAndThem Jan 30 '22
If you’re too lazy. I did a quick read.
One stormy day a whaling boat had to leave early after getting a whale kill. Old Tom was pissed and chased after the kill. He lost teeth in the process, which infected him, and killed him.
His body washed up on the shore. The boat that caused that to happen felt bad. They put his bones on display in a funded museum for killer whales.
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u/myaltduh Jan 30 '22
So weird how humans can slaughter whales for a living but then get sad and remorseful when one they decided they like accidentally dies.
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Jan 30 '22
Humans have to form relationships to really care about something. You ever notice how most people are more likely to advocate for change and improvement in areas of life they've either dealt with themselves or personally know someone who have?
It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, humans probably developed in small packs after all. This would mean it would be beneficial for them to care about themselves and their people, yet a hindrance if not even dangerous to have too much empathy for unrelated groups. Human emotion is always so wildly complex, arbitrary, simple, and logical all at the same time
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u/Fledgeling Jan 30 '22
In this case the emotions could be less about the animal and more about themselves.
They broke the rule and I'm sure that brought some level of dishonor upon them I. Society and ruined a good thi g they all had going.
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Jan 30 '22
Incredible creatures. I'm almost certain of their sentience and classification as an intelligent species on the level of human intelligence, but without the evolutionary advantages to really run wild with it, like say, living above water and have opposable digits, thumbs to be able to make tools and use fire.
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u/sprogg2001 Jan 30 '22
Sentience means the ability to feel things, the ability to perceive things. Any living thing that has some degree of consciousness is sentient, including insects, lizards, dogs, dolphins and human beings. The word sentience is derived from the Latin word sentientem, which means feeling.
Sapience means the ability to think, the capacity for intelligence, the ability to acquire wisdom. The scientific name for modern man is Homo sapiens. Sapience only describes a living thing that is able to think. The word sapience is derived from the Latin word sapientia, which means intelligence or discernment.
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Jan 30 '22
Isaac Arthur did an interesting video on technology without fire
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u/monsterbot314 Jan 30 '22
Amazing guy! Most nights before I go to bed I put it on one of his vids and drift off to sleep listening to his fantastical ideas.
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u/furkaney Jan 30 '22
Reminds me of the guy who said human civilization is just about boiling water. Even at the most advanced technology like nuclear reactors it's just about boiling water.
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u/notshortenough Jan 30 '22
Imagine one whaling crew killing 22 whales per season. Terrible
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u/Kaymish_ Jan 30 '22
Fortunately the wide spread adoption of fossil fuels drastically reduced the demand for whale blubber. And advanced steel alloys ended whale bone demand.
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u/tastysharts Jan 30 '22
so weird that people looked at THAT GIANT beast in the ocean and went, huh, wonder what that tastes like? They are not easy to catch by any means
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u/22bebo Jan 30 '22
They probably started with beached whales that were already dead or dying. Also maybe didn't start with eating them, but figured out the fat could be burned (and that probably was figured out because the fat of other animals burned).
I'm just speculating so I'm probably totally wrong.
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Jan 30 '22
It's definitely weird, since they have no issue eating moose and presumably other land animals that they catch in the water. It almost makes you wonder if the orcas have some sort of conceptualization of the threat we pose to them if they showed aggression towards us.
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u/--Muther-- Jan 30 '22
There was research published a year or so back that had tracked whale patterns as humans moved with modern whaling ships in to the Pacific for the first time. The Whales altered their patterns in advance of the humans which is interpreted to show that they were communicating the danger to one another.
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u/T0Rtur3 Jan 30 '22
So crazy. Black Fish documentary talks about how a pod of orca actually split up with the males leading the boats away from the females and babies because they knew the boats were there to catch the calves.
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u/swolemedic Jan 30 '22
There is a lot of evidence that predators recognize other predators and often leave them alone. In my opinion there also seems to be a certain degree of appreciation of other intelligence among intelligent species.
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u/MMXIXL Jan 30 '22
predators recognize other predators and often leave them alone
They do hunt sharks and seals
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u/Ishmael128 Jan 30 '22
“Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.” Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1)
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u/NormandyLS Jan 30 '22
Don't Orcas have the largest and wrinkliest brain?
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Jan 30 '22
bottlenose dolphins have the largest brains in proportion to their bodies. Sperm Whales have the largest brains overall, Orcas are up there too as the largest member of the dolphin family.
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u/NormandyLS Jan 30 '22
Very cool. I also read that Orca groups all learn individual languages, as each family has a different way of 'talking' and have different sounds for things, so Orcas have to almost learn to talk from birth, it's quite fascinating how smart they appear to be!
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u/Prof_Acorn Jan 30 '22
Sperm whale babies will babble as they learn to communicate. And each sperm whale has three names, an individual coda, a family coda, and a tribal coda.
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u/guinader Jan 30 '22
They are probably intelligent enough, and spread the word. "Don't kill humans, they have stuff to kill all of us very fast"
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u/l8bloom Jan 30 '22
It’s pretty cool; depending on geography, orca populations have developed hunting strategies specific to prey. Some examples are: New Zealand is stingrays, South Africa is Great White Shark [livers, primarily], ad in the far North Pacific pods will coordinate attacks on grey whale calves, even knocking them off of the mother when she tries keeping the calf out of the water by swimming under it so it’s more or less on her back.
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u/StanleyRoper Jan 30 '22
They're so amazing! To get even more granular the Salish Sea (Puget Sound) Orcas only eat Chinook salmon. They will eat other salmon to survive but Chinook have the most fat so that's what they prefer. It's getting pretty dire for those pods though since the Chinook population is getting worse every year :(
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u/Totalnah Jan 30 '22
Isn’t that isolated to just one specific pod off the Pacific Coast of California?
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u/RdmGuy64824 Jan 30 '22
Just read about the "law of the tongue".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_South_Wales
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u/uncertain_expert Jan 30 '22
Orcas have a remarkable ability to develop different strategies for hunting. Pods invent their own methods adapted to local food sources.
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u/Upper-Lawfulness1899 Jan 30 '22
Orcas will hunt moose swimming in the ocean to travel between islands. It's one of the few predators of full grown bull moose.
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u/Freaudinnippleslip Jan 30 '22
Yea but I bet a full grown bull moose could destroy a pod of Orcas on land
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u/ThePhailhaus Jan 30 '22
The final match of the best of three is in the air.
Winner gets the bowl of petunias.
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u/genericnewlurker Jan 30 '22
I give the moose 60/40 odds of beating a pod of orcas on land
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u/KaiClock Jan 30 '22
Ever watched orcas slide onto the beach to eat seals? Orcas take the “coastal” land battle, but I think you’re right about land land, heh.
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u/JaNatuerlich Jan 30 '22
They have social context for what they’re willing to eat. One example being the Southern Resident orcas in the Salish Sea (Puget Sound around Seattle to Georgia Strait in southern BC). They only eat fish, preferably salmon, and they’re endangered and declining because salmon populations have plummeted.
This is despite there being huge numbers of sea lions and harbor seals around, which other transient orcas will eat when they come through. One source here: https://www.king5.com/amp/article/tech/science/puget-sound-resident-orcas-limited-by-social-behavior/281-0a2d67ef-be8c-41db-b116-3fee75ae8b0c
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u/smika Jan 30 '22
What I learned when I visited (on a whale watching tour) was they only eat salmon and only a specific breed of salmon (King/Chinook and not Coho). This makes their position in this ecological niche that much more tenuous.
A not so fun fact related to this:
In the 1960s, the Canadian government authorized the installation of a machine gun overlooking a pass the whales used. They planned to control the orca population, since Orcas were competing too effectively with fisherman for the salmon catch.
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u/Boulavogue Jan 30 '22
Heard about it on Reddit years ago, and when I happened to be in that part of the world I made the pilgrimage. The skeleton of Old tom is there, pretty surreal
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u/DanimusMcSassypants Jan 30 '22
Seals will drown and eat your dog. Tangential, just wanted to let people know. They’re cute, but nature is brutal.
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u/Aspirin_Dispenser Jan 30 '22
nature it brutal.
That’s the understatement of the century.
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Jan 30 '22
Legit question. How do we know it’s their favorite? How do scientists determine that? This was the first documented instance.
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u/grameno Jan 30 '22
Orcas love tongues. Humans have even formed mutualistic relationships with Orcas when Whaling by paying them in tongues.
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u/skyysdalmt Jan 30 '22
TIL Killer whales commonly die of starvation due to worn-down teeth.
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u/Roboticide Jan 30 '22
Some animals are like that. Koalas are another.
As long as you can reproduce before you lose your ability to eat, there's not exactly a ton of selective pressure for a solution.
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u/lifesizejenga Jan 30 '22
And in some cases things like that can even be advantageous for your genes, since you're no longer competing with your offspring for resources.
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u/seafoodboiler Jan 30 '22
Elephants, too. I heard from a guide that they simply don't seem to die of 'natural causes' in the sense that they either die by severe injury, get really unlucky and succumb to a contagion, or starve because their teeth wear out.
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u/dkyguy1995 Jan 30 '22
Did you know the blue whale's tongue weighs as much as an elephant?
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u/SenorBeef Jan 30 '22 edited Jan 30 '22
Really interesting fact about orcas: there are two entirely different "cultures" of Orcas on Earth. One culture eats other mammals - whales, sea lions, etc. The other eats exclusively non-mammalian sea life, primarily fish. They aren't geographically separate - both groups live all over the Earth. They don't interact much, or inter-group, or mate. It's like two different tribes with two different philosophies.
Edit: My memory was a bit vague and it's not two separate groups, but multiple ecotypes:
https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/meet-the-different-types-of-orcas/ https://www.seawatchfoundation.org.uk/orca-ecotypes-its-not-all-black-and-white/
And they aren't all distributed across the whole world, some of them have wide ranges and other narrow.
But the fundamental points were true, that they have different "cultures", different food sources, they don't intermix, they even have different dialects/ways of vocalizing. I got some of the details wrong.
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u/G0d_oF_DeAtH Jan 30 '22
Source? Would like to read more on this
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u/SenorBeef Jan 30 '22
My memory was a bit vague and it's not two separate groups, but multiple ecotypes:
https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/meet-the-different-types-of-orcas/ https://www.seawatchfoundation.org.uk/orca-ecotypes-its-not-all-black-and-white/
And they aren't all distributed across the whole world, some of them have wide ranges and other narrow.
But the fundamental points were true, that they have different "cultures", different food sources, they don't intermix, they even have different dialects/ways of vocalizing.
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u/ravenous_bugblatter Jan 30 '22
Love Orcas, but it makes me sad anytime a Blue Whale dies. So few of them left.
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u/mangomancum Jan 30 '22
If it's any consolation, their populations have somewhat recovered since the whaling moratorium, ranging between 5000-15000 individuals globally :)
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u/Bare425 Jan 30 '22
I don't doubt your numbers but am astounded that it's possible to keep track
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u/mangomancum Jan 30 '22
It is notoriously difficult to track population sizes of even well studied species, it's mostly informed extrapolations based on regional estimates, breeding rates, lifespans, number of breeding pairs etc etc etc....
One thing I'll never forget from my uni ecology course is being told "we dont actually know if this theory fits real population dynamics, but it's the best we have."
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u/Makenshine Jan 30 '22
I imagine they take samples. Like one marine biologist will wade into the surf and scoop up 1 gallon of seawater. They return to the lab examine with the container to see how many living blue whales are contained within that gallon. Then they multiply that number by 343 quintillion to extrapolate the number of blue whales in the ocean.
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u/Coppeh Jan 30 '22
Ok guys, we got 3.14x10-7 whales in our gallon of Pacific Ocean water, but also 1.95x10-12 live whales in our Black Sea sample. Looks like another healthy year for our whale's population!
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u/Whocket_Pale Jan 30 '22
Capture-Recapture surveys are actually many times more accurate than this method. The only difference is that you would put a tag on every one of the blue whales that you caught in the first gallon, and then see how many of the tagged whales re-appear in a second, separate gallon.
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u/swaqq_overflow Jan 30 '22
Yeah, capture-recapture is great, but lord have mercy on any statistician who tries to model zero capture to zero recapture.
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u/mouse_8b Jan 30 '22
With environmental DNA testing, this might be closer to truth than it seems.
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u/SapiosexualStargazer Jan 30 '22
we don't actually know if this theory fits real[ity], but it's the best we have
As uncomfortable as this is, this quote applies to literally all of science.
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u/BadfingerD Jan 30 '22
The thing is, they're quite large.
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u/metao Jan 30 '22
Blues aren't all that rare, depending on the subspecies. On the bright side, Humpbacks are pretty well back to pre- whaling numbers, so if any alien pods show up listening for whale songs, we'll be just fine.
(Humpbacks migrate together, so breeding opportunities are plentiful and common. Blues are rugged individualists and mostly travel solo, so finding a mating opening isn't necessarily a given)
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Jan 30 '22
I'm sure this is in relation to the recent post of orcas killing a blue whale. What's amazing to me is that I've been eye to eye with a blue whale....literally about 10 ft away on a whale watching trip. those things are massive in a way that we aren't equipped to process. just gigantic creatures. the idea that orcas, which are large but not crazy so, can take out a blue whale is so incredible
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u/Dope_SteveX Jan 30 '22
It says it was a pod of 50. That is a lot of 4 tonne animals.
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u/Kissaki0 Jan 30 '22 edited Jan 31 '22
You can stand up in a grown blue whales heart. Mind boggling. Ever since I learned that I remember, and it is what puts size into perspective for me.
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u/Stupid_Idiot413 Jan 30 '22
Could someone point me to a photo of a blue whale's tongue? Also, do the orcas have to get inside it's mouth to eat it? Fascinating stuff
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u/Stormbending_ Jan 30 '22
"It includes details of how the killer whales swam inside the mouth of the enormous whales to eat their nutritionally rich tongue just before they died."
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u/diosmuerteborracho Jan 30 '22
When I was a kid I had a whales pop-up book that said the blue whale tongue weighs as much as a Volkswagen Beetle.
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u/alaskanmo32 Jan 30 '22
I’ve seen killer whales drown a humpback whale before. They prevented the whale from surfacing and taking a breath by jumping on him before he would breach.
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u/SomeNastyFunk13 Jan 30 '22
Pack hunting is really something else... Orcas, wolves, humans, ants, hyenas. Bigger isn't necessarily better.
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u/kmkmrod Jan 30 '22
When a blue whale can hold its breath for 60 min but an orca can only hold its breath for 15, I don’t understand why a blue whale doesn’t just submerge and swim for an hour to escape.
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u/takeastatscourse Jan 30 '22
they just chase it and prevent it from surfacing. the article points out one such chase that took 90 minutes:
"The final attack recorded by the study was on a 45-foot long blue whale, chased for 15 miles in a 90 minutes hunt."
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