[HN Gopher] Dolphins at popular spot miss tourists and keep leav...
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Dolphins at popular spot miss tourists and keep leaving 'gifts' on
shore
Author : SirLJ
Score : 195 points
Date : 2020-05-21 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (7news.com.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (7news.com.au)
| kevinguay wrote:
| Seems to be all backwards. The dolphins can't imagine what
| happened to us:
|
| "So long and thanks for all the gifts"
| newman8r wrote:
| I kayak in the ocean and have been seeing more whales and
| dolphins near shore than usual. My layman's theory is that it's
| due to fewer whale watching boats bothering them - I can hear
| those boats from miles away.
| rapnie wrote:
| Also could be that the underwater sounds we humans create, is
| probably way less than it used to be.
| [deleted]
| SeanFerree wrote:
| Love dolphins!!
| idoby wrote:
| Serves them right, not so much "so long and thanks for all the
| fish" now, huh?
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| Most wild life don't miss humans presence though, vegetable and
| insects, birds really got back last weeks, hope it'll last.
|
| Marvellous fruit in the wild too: figs, medlars (I've fed myself
| almost exclusively with those last days!), thanks to insects and
| low air pollution
| mrfusion wrote:
| I've never been able to find it there's been much research in
| communicating with dolphins. Especially with all of the latest
| machine learning and translation research. It would be so cool if
| they could open source a data set of dolphins recordings with
| context. (Maybe sound and video)
|
| Does anyone have the sea world connections to make that happen?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that research to that effect _is_ going on,
| even involving attempts at simple bi-directional communication
| with dolphins in the wild. It 's just slow and hard - wild
| dolphins are nowhere near as easy or cheap to deal with as
| fancy mice in a cage.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I thought that too but I can't find anything. Maybe the two
| skill sets are just so different that no one ends up working
| on it. Marine biology and data science.
| RandyRanderson wrote:
| "Sorry about the Covi and thanks for all the fish?"
| kilroy123 wrote:
| After all the strict lock-downs every weekend, here in Istanbul.
| There are a ton of dolphins swimming in the Bosphorus straight.
| I've been told by locals there are normally not so many around.
|
| I sit on the balcony each weekend and see dolphins swimming about
| every single day. Sometimes they're very close to land.
|
| My theory is, they're around, due to drastically less boat
| traffic. Either way, they sure seem happy humans aren't around.
| toyg wrote:
| Ah man, you've given me nostalgia - the strait is so beautiful,
| and I loved the city. I will be back, sooner or later.
| dmix wrote:
| That must be a nice view. Do you see a lot of warships or other
| interesting stuff crossing the straight?
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Oh yeah, I see all kinds of random industrial ships go by.
| I've only seen one small warship. I haven't been here long, I
| just sort of got stuck here in Istanbul and I'm waiting out
| the pandemic.
| NetBeck wrote:
| What if they are wondering where humans went and are
| experimenting with luring humans toward the water? Not something
| out of necessity, but curiosity.
| keenmaster wrote:
| Dolphins probably have a multi-tiered approach to dealing with
| humans. When they can get free food without trying, they don't
| bother performing high cost activities. When humans stubbornly
| refuse to give food, they escalate "pro-social" behavior. When
| humans don't show up, they resort to the highest cost way of
| attracting them.
|
| I don't believe they actually miss the tourists themselves.
| Tourists are merely delivery vehicles for food. People are
| probably projecting their fantasies about animals being
| fundamentally better than humans.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| But surely this multi-tiered approach is not articulated
| logically or linguistically by the dolphins themselves. They
| can't be cynical if they don't reason. So the instinct or
| memory that makes them associate humans and food must manifest
| as some kind of feeling, right?
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| They say in the article that "In all likelihood, they probably
| don't miss humans per se. They probably miss a free meal and
| the routine." and "When it's not happening, maybe it's just out
| of boredom."
|
| Which actually seems more plausible to me than food motivation.
| Dolphins are one of the most intelligent, social, and
| oftentimes pointlessly cruel animals we know of. All this
| points to an animal with a cognitive level capable of having
| been interested in humans and now being bored due to their
| absence. And in that boredom, having not much better to do with
| their time than go looking for "gifts". It's also possible
| they're just motivated by the food of course, but ultimately I
| feel like a Dolphin's mental complexity is high enough that
| it's hard for us to say exactly what motivates them in complex
| situations.
| eggsnbacon1 wrote:
| cruel sometimes maybe, but dolphins are also very well known
| for saving humans from drowning. I don't think its fair to
| project human characteristics onto animals, but at least some
| of what dolphins due is altruistic.
|
| The drowning and shark savior stories are countless, and date
| back to before recorded history in some cultures. Maybe they
| aren't so bad?
|
| There's also studies that can't find any reason they follow
| ship wakes besides "fun". I think they don't get as much
| credit as they may deserve
| kirrent wrote:
| I've sailed with dolphins plenty of times. They've tended
| to lose interest when I was on a windsurfer or dinghy after
| a minute or so, no matter what speed I was doing. On the
| other hand, when I've been on a cruising cat, they can't
| seem to get enough. As long as you stay over 7 knots under
| sail they'll follow along apparently having great fun,
| particularly around and between the bows. I've even seen a
| large pod travelling in one direction hook a U-turn when
| they saw the boat to play for ten minutes before heading
| back in their original direction.
|
| All of this is to say what everyone else is saying. They're
| complex creatures with sometimes non-trivial motivations.
| kitotik wrote:
| As in humans, it's also possible that they don't all share
| the exact same motivation at the exact same time.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Vacationing Woman Thinks Cats Miss Her
|
| https://www.theonion.com/vacationing-woman-thinks-cats-
| miss-...
| nicoburns wrote:
| The Onion is on point as ever, but dolphins are a lot more
| social than cats.
| ris wrote:
| If there were _one_ onion link posted in these comments I
| would have expected it to be
| https://local.theonion.com/dolphin-spends-amazing-
| vacation-s...
| [deleted]
| undershirt wrote:
| > I don't believe they actually miss the tourists themselves.
| Tourists are _merely_ delivery vehicles for food.
|
| I've recently taken to the idea that intellectual stances and
| embodied experiences are not derivable from one another. Each
| toolkit is separate, and weird things happen when you try to
| extend one into the other.
|
| For example, I felt it emotively when reading your comment,
| that the intellect is extraordinarily good at reducing
| everything into nothing, because it is a core presupposition
| that we _must view_ things mechanically, to _have_ mechanical
| proficiency.
|
| Similarly, to have _emotional_ proficiency, we must make our
| emotional presuppositions. This is not the obsolete definition
| of "myth" as stories we make up to make us feel good, because
| that's again a framing of a reductionist intellect.
|
| What I'm trying to limn is not anti-intellectualism, but that
| there is no common framework to contain both of these separate
| modalities. Don't let the stomach cannibalize the liver, we
| need both.
| keenmaster wrote:
| I hear you, and I think it's valuable to delineate the
| intellectual from the emotional to some extent. With love
| being such a nebulous concept, I want to set out my narrow
| definition in the context of this conversation.
| Anthropomorphic love necessarily requires abstract cognition
| which is beyond the abilities of dolphins. Dolphins can love
| you, and love each other, but the love is entirely rooted in
| lower cognitive states which simply draw a connection between
| you and a few very tangible, primal things.
|
| There's love, and then there's love love.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Tourists are merely delivery vehicles for food
|
| People say that about pets too, but those people usually don't
| own pets. Why can't animals have similar social instincts to
| humans? Maybe they just want to hang out too.
| jungletime wrote:
| "The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa-funded project that went
| wrong"
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolp...
| strogonoff wrote:
| The same logic can be applied to humans.
|
| "I don't believe parents actually love their children and vice-
| versa. Parents are merely delivery vehicles of food for
| children. Children are delivery vehicles of future care for
| parents. Humans are probably projecting their fantasies about
| themselves being fundamentally better than they are in
| reality."
|
| We don't directly perceive that dolphins project _their_
| fantasies about humans, but like with our fellow humans, it
| doesn't mean they aren't doing that.
| cephaslr wrote:
| Being merely a delivery vehicle for my children's food would
| explain some of their behavior...
| em-bee wrote:
| this can be seen in some cultures where the eldest son and
| his family are held in high esteem because he is the one
| responsible for taking care of the parentd while daugthers
| are a burden, since they will be with their husband
| supporting the husbands parents.
| number6 wrote:
| You clearly don't have children. No amount of fantasy
| projection makes up for the trouble you go through. You have
| to be spiked with oxytocin to cope with it.
| tprice7 wrote:
| I think that was the point. They are trying to show how
| that sort of logic is flawed.
| number6 wrote:
| You are right.. sleep deprivation is a bitch
| pmiller2 wrote:
| I was going to downvote out of disagreement, but, on second
| thought, this makes good sense. We probably wouldn't hesitate
| to say "I don't believe $NONHUMAN_ANIMAL parents love their
| children, and vice-versa...." about most animals. There might
| be hesitation when it comes to apes, monkeys, and maybe dogs,
| but I can imagine people would say it about, say, hyenas, and
| it would seem plausible.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I don't know about "love" because it has a lot of
| connotations but try to take a baby from a litter from any
| animal and watch how crazy mama animal gets. Swans, cats,
| birds, dogs, bears, whales, whatever.
| Sharlin wrote:
| It's easy to anthropomorphize animals, but it's also easy
| to go overboard in the other direction. In general, as our
| understanding of animal cognition has increased, we have
| moved away from human exceptionalism, finding that traits
| once thought to be unique to humans are anything but.
| Certainly we've come far from the Cartesian viewpoint of
| non-human animals as mindless automata.
|
| "Love" in particular, of course, is both a highly loaded
| and acutely ill-defined concept, so "can a <non-human
| animal> feel love" is probably a wrong question [1].
|
| By the way, it's rather appropriate that you mentioned
| hyenas given how misunderstood they are by laypeople, in no
| small part due to their presentation in a certain Disney
| film.
|
| [1]
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XzrqkhfwtiSDgKoAF/wrong-
| ques...
| amelius wrote:
| It seems we are getting in philosophical territory here.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_love
| roosterdawn wrote:
| I don't think this logic applied to humans actually is
| inaccurate. For much of human history, extended family
| cohabitation was the norm, and the standard American nuclear
| was a radical, almost unimaginable idea. Most animals operate
| on a biological impulse to further their offspring; do most
| animals operate this way to pursue immortality and evade
| death?
|
| I don't see anything inaccurate with this base level
| analysis, although it obviously elides most of the finer
| elements of human existence that exist a bit higher up on
| Maslow's hierarchy.
| MichailP wrote:
| If several possible motivations describe the same behavior, why
| go for the most cynical one? It is not a sign of intellectual
| rigor. There is a wide array of emotions, and not every action
| is driven on fear and selfishness, in fact the best things most
| certainly aren't.
| majormajor wrote:
| How would this involve being "better" than humans?
|
| The projection here would solely be: "people are social animals
| and we miss seeing the dolphins; dolphins are social animals
| and they could miss us too"
|
| That's a much smaller leap than you're suggesting people are
| making. The other way also seems to risk erring on the "people
| are special and unique compared to animals" side.
| keenmaster wrote:
| To clarify, I meant some people not all. I've observed an
| uptick in Malthusian sentiment.
|
| It's not uncommon for people to say things like this:
| "Honestly is it wrong that I'm happier that the dog survived
| the car crash than its owner?" or "it would be better if we
| all just die off and let Mother Nature heal."
| major505 wrote:
| There are cases of dolphins bonding with humans, but they are
| formed after long periods of time. There's that famous fu __ed
| stoty of the douphin that commit suicide and inspired the ECCO
| games.
| jmull wrote:
| Both people and dolphins are highly social. Of course the food
| is an important part of the interaction, but it seems likely
| they view humans socially and get more out of the interaction
| than, say, if they were pressing a lever to get food. (BTW,
| food is an important part of human social interactions as well
| -- probably the easiest way to get someone to like you is to
| feed them.)
|
| I don't know that, of course, but I'm only assuming dolphin
| social tendencies can bridge the species gap in a similar way
| that human social tendencies do (and for cats, and dogs, and
| horses, and lions, etc.)
| asdf21 wrote:
| >I don't believe they actually miss the tourists themselves.
| Tourists are merely delivery vehicles for food.
|
| Sharing food between mammals generally leads to bonding. Like,
| all mammals.
| kitotik wrote:
| Hmm, I've bonded with birds via food too. At least I like to
| think I did ;)
| keenmaster wrote:
| Birds are brutal. Watch this black stork kill her weakest
| baby while its siblings wait for the meal.
|
| https://youtu.be/4QkzwXMPDnI
| kitotik wrote:
| Ha! Fair point. I didn't mention that I've also had
| fingers pierced to the bone by birds.
| [deleted]
| rozab wrote:
| I don't think this is a fair conclusion at all. Dolphin
| behaviour has been well studied and it's clear that they seek
| out mental stimulation for its own sake.
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| I've heard this said about cats, that cats view humans strictly
| as food dispensers. But I've personally seen cats develop
| separation anxiety when they thought their humans weren't
| around -- and then settle right down as soon as a familiar
| human come into view. To a cat, humans provide some manner of
| physical and emotional _security_ as well, to say nothing of
| affection.
|
| It's the same with any healthy human relationship. Can you
| imagine how sad it would be to make extraordinary efforts for a
| person who did absolutely nothing for you? We reward those who
| provide us something of value -- security, affection, a
| sympathetic ear -- with our sacrifices.
| timthorn wrote:
| > settle right down as soon as a familiar human come into
| view
|
| After a period of sulking first, of course.
| chris_va wrote:
| It must be frustrating as a cat.
|
| Imagine going through the effort to domesticate and entire
| species to provide fire, food, shelter, etc. and then have
| them wander off somewhere without asking. At least they
| still upload those funny worship videos to the internet.
| wondringaloud wrote:
| I don't see how your anecdote differentiates between these
| two scenarios:
|
| 1. Human leaves, cat gets separation anxiety due to feeling
| less emotionally secure
|
| 2. Human leaves, cat gets separation anxiety because their
| primary source of food is missing
| wl wrote:
| I've seen cats bond with people who don't feed them.
|
| Some cats are food motivated. Others are affection
| motivated. Some are both.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| I've had a cat eat my hair which is a grooming behavior
| they otherwise only do with other cats that they trust.
| If that isn't evidence of some kind of mutual
| relationship then I don't know what is.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| If you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?
| netdur wrote:
| could be this how religions started?
| chime wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| What an annoying site. I feel like this should get tagged
| [popover autoplay video].
|
| Or maybe, here's a link without that:
|
| https://digg.com/2020/dolphins-leaving-gifts
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've changed the URL from https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-
| briefing-room/news/498781-car... to what appears to be the
| original source and appears not to autoplay a video.
| nchase wrote:
| digg? I haven't heard that name in years.
|
| Also agreed, much better link.
| pwg wrote:
| I've got NoScript installed and set for default deny of all
| javascript. I read the article, but did not have to contend
| with any popover autoplay videos.
| arkanciscan wrote:
| Scare quotes belong around 'miss' not 'gifts'.
| ddrt wrote:
| Based on the assortment of items I'm impressed they are able to
| find things that are potentially useful or unique and
| interesting. Makes me fear for our future when they rise up and
| take over.
| naringas wrote:
| so... they are bringing offerings presumably hoping this will
| make their free meals return...
|
| so curious reminds me of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propitiation
| neonate wrote:
| Reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I went to Tin Can Bay three months ago and fed the dolphins
| there. There's a tiny little cafe that manages the process and
| hundreds of people turn up every morning. Presumably the
| operation makes good money.
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| "In all likelihood, they probably don't miss humans per se," [a
| dolphin expert] added. "They probably miss a free meal and the
| routine."
|
| This describes my feelings about not being able to go to work
| exactly.
| rglover wrote:
| I'm cracking up reading this and hearing it with the monotone
| voice of the guy in the video.
| dang wrote:
| We changed the URL but you can find the video via
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23261711.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2020-05-21 23:01 UTC)