Pat my head?
David Wilcove of Princeton, world-renowned expert on endangered species, was on Fresh Air, 2007-12-05. He discussed gray whales’ changing relationships with people. In the 19th century, gray whales were known as “devil fish” and would attack boats. Reasonable. The whalers, for their part, would harpoon calves first, knowing that the mother would not abandon her calf, leaving her available to be harpooned afterwards. Sounds like clear-cut self-defense to me. Now, he says,
After several decades of protection when the whales were no longer being harvested … [the whales] would bring their young up to the boats to meet the people, and this has continued to the present day as more and more whales seem to seek out this sort of contact with people. [N]o one is certain what’s going on, but my hunch is the whales recognize that humans are no longer a threat to them, and they are genuinely curious about people and boats, and I think they also like to get their heads patted.
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4 Responses to “Pat my head?”
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December 12th, 2007 at 17h43
OK, a preëmptive strike against my readers who are right now, presumably, penning missives chastising me for anthropomorphizing.
If I were trying to program a large social animal such as a whale efficiently, I’d put a basic control structure such as the following in place:
1. If you encounter something novel in the water, investigate it. It might be useful.
2. If you or a conspecific are attacked by the novelty, fear future instances of it.
3. If you fear something, attack it or flee from at, as deemed appropriate.
4. If you see a conspecific attack or flee from something, fear future instances of it.
Then all we need for a cascade of learning to fear humans is one whale to escape an attack, and whales to reorganize into different pods nonzero times.
A side effect of this is that, as incidents with whaling boats decrease, whale attrition begins to erode the distributed heuristics of the species. Once a significant enough number of whales die, the curiosity routine will re-emerge as dominant.
December 13th, 2007 at 07h18
That was my favorite part of the interview, as well.
Also, you know that people only pen missives on this site when you mention their relatives.
December 13th, 2007 at 09h43
Did you just call me a whale, asshole? Huh? Huh?
December 13th, 2007 at 10h25
That’s not funny. My father is a whale.
YOU NEVER EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT THAT, DID YOU?!?!