Posted on 04/17/2019 12:36:30 PM PDT by C19fan
When faced with a killer whale, it seems even Jaws might take pause for thought — as new research reveals great white sharks beat a hasty retreat if orcas are around.
What happens when top-level predators meet on land is well documented, but little is known about similar interactions in our oceans.
To find out, a US research team led from the Monterey Bay Aquarium searched for encounters between great whites — among the most ferocious of all sharks — and orcas (killer whales), in electronic tagging and observational data.
In every case where the two predators came into contact, the sharks actually turned tail and fled from the killer whales, researchers found.
Sporadic reports of orcas attacking great whites have been recorded, but this is the first evidence of sharks actively avoiding the whales.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Mr Krabs as well as Karen his computer wife would disagree about Plankton being king of the ocean.
I’ve seen orcas in action while I was salmon fishing.
They were playing frisby with sea lions. Pink water.
There is an older youtube video by David Berlinsky(sp) who talks about the impossibility of a cow changing into a whale. the TOE suggests that some land mammal had to have decided to become a water dweller and slowly change. This had to happen in a relatively small amount of time for evolution. Never mind the fact that there is no evidence of any animal ever changing kinds.
I highly recommend David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet on Blu Ray.
“the TOE suggests that some land mammal had to have decided to become a water dweller and slowly change”
I’ve never heard of that. I have heard of sea creatures emerging from the water.
Worked on an albacore boat one summer off of the California coast. The boss would not let us on deck when he saw killer whales. There were stories of them snatching guys off of the deck. Don’t know if the stories were true, but he certainly believed them. He claimed he knew a guy who climbed up his mast to avoid them. (And this was at least 20 years before the movie Tremors).
Ahh, ya doesn't has to call me Johnson!
You can call me Ray,
or you can call me Jay,
or you can call me Johnny
or you can call me Sonny,
or you can call me RayJay,
or you can call me RJ...
but ya doesn't hafta call me Johnson."
They are pretty non-threatening to humans, at least in the wild. The big danger from orcas seems to be from ones that are in captivity, where they can go nutso.
I remember reading somewhere that the Inuit will not take their kayaks into pods of orca. I'll defer to their knowledge. Maybe orca are not aggressive towards humans but I have to think that a kayak from the underside must resemble a seal floating on the surface of the water. All it would take is one near-sighted orca to totally ruin your day.
“Killer Whales.....
KILLER Whales.......”
Yeah, they are big, they are smarter than anything (except maybe blue and sperm whales), and they hunt in packs like wolves. I wouldn’t want to be a lone shark up against that...and, apparently, neither do the sharks. The sharks aren’t THAT stupid, and have a rather finely tuned survival drive that’s carried the species for a few tens of millions of years.
Millions of years ago, ancient land-dwelling mammals returned to the sea. Their bodies became streamlined for swimming, articulated fingers turned into flippers and fins, hypnotic songs slowly filled the oceans—and, somewhere during the evolutionary process, the newly evolving marine mammals lost a particular gene called Paraoxonase 1, or PON1.
Perhaps that gene was no longer necessary for organisms adapted to life in the water; as evolution streamlined aquatic bodies, it may have similarly streamlined genomes. But whatever the reason, PON1 ceased to function in each of the three marine mammal lineages that are today’s whales and dolphins, manatees and dugongs, seals and sea lions.
Speaking of evolution....
Based on DNA comparisons, whales are the closest living relative to the hippopotamus.
Most people outside of Africa do not realize that the hippo is one of the most dangerous animals to humans.
They are psychotically territorial.
They can literally bite a crocodile in half with one snap.
Hippos leave the water at night to forage on land.
Humans get killed when they accidentally block the path of a hippo back to the water, or when farmers try to scare hippos away from their crops.
Almost all humans who die get trampled, not bit.
Hippo attacks on small boats are relatively rare - unless you get too close.
Please elucidate...
That's amazing. I though of them as the nice cousin to the Rhino. My wife and I just saw a rhino at a zoo in Florida last week. What a huge animal!
That snapping an alligator in half thing is particularly amazing.
Yes, me too. But it is believed that animals evolved up to mammals on the land. It was a simpler critter that crawled out of the water.
Also changing from a land mammal to a aquatic mammal isn’t simply growing flippers and fins. (As if that is simple) It would also require a drastic metabolic change. No mammal could live in the water if it needed to resurface every 30-60 seconds. Also the animal would need to be able to cope with the rapid pressure changes and need a mechanism to prevent the bends from occurring.
Post 23 does. Well a little.
In the video I mentioned David B first discusses the engineering challenge of changing a car to a submarine. This would obviously be a huge redesign. So now lets discuss the changes needed to make to a cow so that it can live in the open ocean. He discusses system after system that would have to change and said he quit counting at 50,000. So lets quantify that many unguided random changes. No one has ever even tried to figure out how many failed changes it would take before you get an actual profitable change. The time compression of the TOE forces all this to happen in some small number of millions of years so these changes would have to be happening constantly.
Reality shows us that animals have build in methods of correcting errors in DNA. Change just doesn't happen only cancer and birth defects that are killed off.
Watched the Documentary blackfish.
They told a eerie story of the trainer in the 1970’s who was about 20 years old who was just feeding them from the side of the pool and slipped into the pool with the orcas. One of the orcas grabbed her and played with her like a ragdoll.
The orca would come out of the water with her (the trainer) and the crowd could hear her screaming “HELP ME, HELP ME, I DON’T WANT TO DIE”
This continued for about 5 minutes. There was nothing the crowd or trainers could do about it.
The biggest hoax was to convince SeaWorld goers that these animals are “friendly”.
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