14 ms·

Something is killing gray whales

217 points by prostoalex 5y ago

nsizx 5y ago
Gotta nuke something.
anyfoo 5y ago
The oceans are dying. Solving this problem should be a priority, but the effects are too complex and not immediately visible enough for people to care. I fear that by the time the effects will noticeably endanger humanity, not only will it be too late, people still might not understand the causation.
- illumin8 5y ago
  Most likely the root cause is acidification of the ocean. Increasing the carbon dioxide in the ocean decreases the ph level of water, making it more acidic. While some animals and plants have evolved to handle highly acidic environments, most have not, and in general acid tends to be bad for living creatures. I know I'm oversimplifying things, but this seems reasonable. I assume if there were giant balls of plastic pollution in the whales belly this would be found in an autopsy and therefore plastic pollution is probably not the root cause.
  - anyfoo 5y ago
    Did you mean to reply to me? I did not ascribe a single cause. What you say makes sense, but I don't think it's safe to say that only a single cause is present. Although prioritizing the biggest problem first seems reasonable of course, my fear is that we don't prioritize any of it in time...
- hack-news 5y ago
  I don't fear it, it's going to be fucking hilarious to watch all of these pricks dying! I'm probably gonna jump on HN when the world is ending and shitpost about how most of you have it coming.
- kwere 5y ago
  tell that to the china fishing fleets
robertwt7 5y ago
Noo, 219 dies in 6 months? That's a lot for grey whale is it not? I really wish I could help somehow with software.. If only there's something open source like call for code that's being used to help the environment. Would 100% dedicate hours to do that after work
- Guest42 5y ago
  I wish it would be possible to know the amount of energy used unnecessarily with software and have it bucketed. I think that there’s a lot of telemetry and unnecessary video rendering that would add up (among many other things not listed...)
  - anyfoo 5y ago
    There totally is, power budgeting is a very common thing. But you need an incentive to apply it first, otherwise it's just ignored if it stands in the way for shipping. Smartphones for example always have that because they run on battery power and runtime is a big factor. But we need to apply this to more than just battery powered devices with long runtime needs.
- lnwlebjel 5y ago
  This group is often looking for SWE types, though not at the moment: https://boi.ucsb.edu/ https://boi.ucsb.edu/
- beambot 5y ago
  According to this source, Russia killed 137 Grey Whales in 2019: https://iwc.int/total-catches https://iwc.int/total-catches Sounds like there might be a simple way to offset the die-off...
  - prawn 5y ago
    Those are marked on that page as "Aboriginal subsistence catches": "In some parts of the world, whale products play an important role in the nutritional and cultural life of native peoples. Four IWC member countries conduct aboriginal subistence hunts today: Denmark (Greenland), Russia (Chukotka), St Vincent and the Grenadines (Bequia) and the United States (Alaska and also potentially a resumption of hunts previously undertaken by the Makah Tribe of Washington State)." https://iwc.int/aboriginal https://iwc.int/aboriginal Looks like they manage allocations based on whale populations. The gray whale's conservation status is marked as "Least Concern". The article submitted to HN notes that grey whales are fairly numerous, and I'd say these recent incidents are a canary-in-coal-mine scenario.
torgian 5y ago
The cause is us. This has been in the works for decades, and we’ve been warned about it since the 70s. Governments just haven’t paid attention because they only care about the _now_ not the future. I’ve seen how fucked our oceans have become since I was young. More debris in areas I never saw plastics before. Snorkeling is more depressing than ever. We can potentially turn this around, but the oceans that we knew twenty years ago are long gone. Act now or life is gonna be that much harder in fifty years. I’m pretty cynical at this point though. I do what I can, but I think we’ve reached the point of no return
- enchiridion 5y ago
  Specifically the governments of Asia need to stop dumping plastic directly into the ocean. Even if they polluted at them same level as the rest of the world, it would be a huge success. But then the rest of the world and the oil industry also deserves blame for spreading the myth of plastic recycling.
  - torgian 5y ago
    Oh no doubt. Plastic pollution is a huge problem here.
  - weddpros 5y ago
    The west needs to stop sending "recyclable" plastics to Asia
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      China used to buy plastic waste from the west (95% of Europe and 70% of USA's plastic waste). China isn't some poverty stricken unaccountable backwater where it was just being dumped, they were explicitly engaging in contracts and giving good rates for backhaul routes on cargo ships. If they then mismanaged the waste after they took ownership of it, that's China's failing. China have since mostly banned that, which sounds like what China needed to do to reign in their incapable plastic recycling industry. So that's fine, but the problem remains that about 80% of ocean plastic waste comes from Asia. Almost 40% from The Philippines alone even when most of the west's waste was going to China. So this can't be handwaved away as being due to "the west", it's a systemic problem in many countries in Asia in particular.
mrtweetyhack 5y ago
west taiwan
404mm 5y ago
Or maybe it’s those 25,000 barrels of DDT that were dumped no that far from there?? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/27/up-to-25000-barrels-found-at-suspected-ddt-dump-off-california-say-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/27/up-to-25... I get that as a civilization we had to go through some .. let’s call it “growing pains”, before we learned what’s ok and what’s not. Dumping metal barrels full of chemicals into the oceans while understanding chemistry enough to manufacture DDT is criminal. It should have been criminal back then too. They knew better.
r_singh 5y ago
I feel heartbroken since watching Seaspiracy. It seems like the only place we want wildlife to exist is in history books…
egberts 5y ago
Thought up and written up by “tobacco scientists”.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
imacerealkiller 5y ago
Humans are the cause, and unless more governments and policies are in place to prevent excessive plastic and waste consumption, there isn’t a hope for wildlife. I do freelance work for a reusable takeaway container company where restaurants stock our boxes and customers need only to download an app to get their food in reusable boxes (they can return anywhere). The app is super easy to download but still people are refusing to do it. I tried convincing a pregnant acquaintance to do it, telling her to think of the planet she’s leaving behind for her unborn child, and still she refused. Why? Convenience. So much easier to throw the damn plastic box away and tell yourself “oh it’s made of recycled plastic anyway.” The fact is, whether it’s recycled plastic or not, plastic is plastic. Driving the demand for recycled plastic boxes isn’t going to fix our planet. Until the government steps in to say every food related shop needs to provide a reusable alternative and customers have to pay more for disposable waste (like how it is now with carrier bags in most supermarkets in Europe), I don’t see much change happening in terms of wildlife. It’s sad but it is what it is.
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  If plastic is as recyclable as plastic manufacturers would have us believe, we could impose a ban on the production of new plastic after a short transitional period. Try suggesting that to anyone with an interest in the plastic production or consumption complex and see how they respond. Even if one wanted to recycle all the plastics they use, it's damn near impossible. Firstly, what is and isn't "currently" recycled is not particularly transparent to the end-user. Your local authority (or privatised collection company in the case of businesses) might have a confusing set of rules and guidelines on how to dispose of different types of plastic (which to most regular folk are just "plastic"). Whoever's collected the waste probably doesn't deal with it themselves but sells it on, and then it's a gamble as to whether that 3rd party recycles it, ships it off to a poorer territory, or just burns it.
  - imacerealkiller 5y ago
    Exactly. I'm very skeptical about the percentage of plastic that is supposedly recycled. Furthermore, even if the plastic is actually recycled, most plastics e.g. polypropylene can only be recycled once.
aaron695 5y ago
> Something is killing gray whales The article showed a real maturity for the media. It was specific, not whales, grey whales. If you want to know why they are dying look at the comments. They don't care. Many can't even be bothered to mention whales. Mostly not one iota of care is given to grey whales. This is the war to be fought. The environmentalist, they are destroying the plant one species at a time. They won't win, but we will lose much while the environmental machinery ploughs as much as it can into the ground to keep it's control.
pvaldes 5y ago
Plastics wouldn't be necessarily my main candidate here. Gray whales are not like other whales. They eat the mud in the bottom and filter it eating the invertebrate burrowers. This means that the big trofic chain of marine scavengers in soft bottoms is disturbed in some way (some way that has been undetected still) or that Eastern Pacific whales of this species have a Fukush... ehem, health, quote, quote, problem. A problem that the Atlantic gray Whales don't have for some reason, it seems.
h2odragon 5y ago
Cats and cows get Covid, why not whales?
batushka3 5y ago
Why no one talks about massif Chinese poaching fleet roaming the oceans. This should be at least in hipotesis list.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  We all want to find a reason why our ocean populations are depleting, but as soon as anyone says China, you're racist (mainly from people on the left, too). This way of thinking and the resulting inaction is going to kill them even faster.
  - smcl 5y ago
    That's not true, rogue Chinese trawling fleets fishing illegally are quite widely and openly discussed - there's no real doubt that they exist and have little incentive to bother fishing sustainably. What is frowned upon is just pointing the finger at "China" in general without being specific or even at least a little self-aware. I've seen a lot of pushback on that, and tbh it's pretty fair.

217 points by prostoalex 5y ago

Gotta nuke something.

The oceans are dying. Solving this problem should be a priority, but the effects are too complex and not immediately visible enough for people to care. I fear that by the time the effects will noticeably endanger humanity, not only will it be too late, people still might not understand the causation.

illumin8 5y ago
Most likely the root cause is acidification of the ocean. Increasing the carbon dioxide in the ocean decreases the ph level of water, making it more acidic. While some animals and plants have evolved to handle highly acidic environments, most have not, and in general acid tends to be bad for living creatures. I know I'm oversimplifying things, but this seems reasonable. I assume if there were giant balls of plastic pollution in the whales belly this would be found in an autopsy and therefore plastic pollution is probably not the root cause.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  Did you mean to reply to me? I did not ascribe a single cause. What you say makes sense, but I don't think it's safe to say that only a single cause is present. Although prioritizing the biggest problem first seems reasonable of course, my fear is that we don't prioritize any of it in time...
hack-news 5y ago
I don't fear it, it's going to be fucking hilarious to watch all of these pricks dying! I'm probably gonna jump on HN when the world is ending and shitpost about how most of you have it coming.
kwere 5y ago
tell that to the china fishing fleets

robertwt7 5y ago

Noo, 219 dies in 6 months? That's a lot for grey whale is it not? I really wish I could help somehow with software.. If only there's something open source like call for code that's being used to help the environment. Would 100% dedicate hours to do that after work

Guest42 5y ago
I wish it would be possible to know the amount of energy used unnecessarily with software and have it bucketed. I think that there’s a lot of telemetry and unnecessary video rendering that would add up (among many other things not listed...)
- anyfoo 5y ago
  There totally is, power budgeting is a very common thing. But you need an incentive to apply it first, otherwise it's just ignored if it stands in the way for shipping. Smartphones for example always have that because they run on battery power and runtime is a big factor. But we need to apply this to more than just battery powered devices with long runtime needs.
lnwlebjel 5y ago
This group is often looking for SWE types, though not at the moment: https://boi.ucsb.edu/ https://boi.ucsb.edu/
beambot 5y ago
According to this source, Russia killed 137 Grey Whales in 2019: https://iwc.int/total-catches https://iwc.int/total-catches Sounds like there might be a simple way to offset the die-off...
- prawn 5y ago
  Those are marked on that page as "Aboriginal subsistence catches": "In some parts of the world, whale products play an important role in the nutritional and cultural life of native peoples. Four IWC member countries conduct aboriginal subistence hunts today: Denmark (Greenland), Russia (Chukotka), St Vincent and the Grenadines (Bequia) and the United States (Alaska and also potentially a resumption of hunts previously undertaken by the Makah Tribe of Washington State)." https://iwc.int/aboriginal https://iwc.int/aboriginal Looks like they manage allocations based on whale populations. The gray whale's conservation status is marked as "Least Concern". The article submitted to HN notes that grey whales are fairly numerous, and I'd say these recent incidents are a canary-in-coal-mine scenario.

torgian 5y ago

The cause is us. This has been in the works for decades, and we’ve been warned about it since the 70s. Governments just haven’t paid attention because they only care about the _now_ not the future. I’ve seen how fucked our oceans have become since I was young. More debris in areas I never saw plastics before. Snorkeling is more depressing than ever. We can potentially turn this around, but the oceans that we knew twenty years ago are long gone. Act now or life is gonna be that much harder in fifty years. I’m pretty cynical at this point though. I do what I can, but I think we’ve reached the point of no return

enchiridion 5y ago
Specifically the governments of Asia need to stop dumping plastic directly into the ocean. Even if they polluted at them same level as the rest of the world, it would be a huge success. But then the rest of the world and the oil industry also deserves blame for spreading the myth of plastic recycling.
- torgian 5y ago
  Oh no doubt. Plastic pollution is a huge problem here.
- weddpros 5y ago
  The west needs to stop sending "recyclable" plastics to Asia
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    China used to buy plastic waste from the west (95% of Europe and 70% of USA's plastic waste). China isn't some poverty stricken unaccountable backwater where it was just being dumped, they were explicitly engaging in contracts and giving good rates for backhaul routes on cargo ships. If they then mismanaged the waste after they took ownership of it, that's China's failing. China have since mostly banned that, which sounds like what China needed to do to reign in their incapable plastic recycling industry. So that's fine, but the problem remains that about 80% of ocean plastic waste comes from Asia. Almost 40% from The Philippines alone even when most of the west's waste was going to China. So this can't be handwaved away as being due to "the west", it's a systemic problem in many countries in Asia in particular.

mrtweetyhack 5y ago

west taiwan

404mm 5y ago

Or maybe it’s those 25,000 barrels of DDT that were dumped no that far from there?? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/27/up-to-25000-barrels-found-at-suspected-ddt-dump-off-california-say-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/27/up-to-25... I get that as a civilization we had to go through some .. let’s call it “growing pains”, before we learned what’s ok and what’s not. Dumping metal barrels full of chemicals into the oceans while understanding chemistry enough to manufacture DDT is criminal. It should have been criminal back then too. They knew better.

r_singh 5y ago

I feel heartbroken since watching Seaspiracy. It seems like the only place we want wildlife to exist is in history books…

egberts 5y ago

Thought up and written up by “tobacco scientists”.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

imacerealkiller 5y ago

Humans are the cause, and unless more governments and policies are in place to prevent excessive plastic and waste consumption, there isn’t a hope for wildlife. I do freelance work for a reusable takeaway container company where restaurants stock our boxes and customers need only to download an app to get their food in reusable boxes (they can return anywhere). The app is super easy to download but still people are refusing to do it. I tried convincing a pregnant acquaintance to do it, telling her to think of the planet she’s leaving behind for her unborn child, and still she refused. Why? Convenience. So much easier to throw the damn plastic box away and tell yourself “oh it’s made of recycled plastic anyway.” The fact is, whether it’s recycled plastic or not, plastic is plastic. Driving the demand for recycled plastic boxes isn’t going to fix our planet. Until the government steps in to say every food related shop needs to provide a reusable alternative and customers have to pay more for disposable waste (like how it is now with carrier bags in most supermarkets in Europe), I don’t see much change happening in terms of wildlife. It’s sad but it is what it is.

dkdbejwi383 5y ago
If plastic is as recyclable as plastic manufacturers would have us believe, we could impose a ban on the production of new plastic after a short transitional period. Try suggesting that to anyone with an interest in the plastic production or consumption complex and see how they respond. Even if one wanted to recycle all the plastics they use, it's damn near impossible. Firstly, what is and isn't "currently" recycled is not particularly transparent to the end-user. Your local authority (or privatised collection company in the case of businesses) might have a confusing set of rules and guidelines on how to dispose of different types of plastic (which to most regular folk are just "plastic"). Whoever's collected the waste probably doesn't deal with it themselves but sells it on, and then it's a gamble as to whether that 3rd party recycles it, ships it off to a poorer territory, or just burns it.
- imacerealkiller 5y ago
  Exactly. I'm very skeptical about the percentage of plastic that is supposedly recycled. Furthermore, even if the plastic is actually recycled, most plastics e.g. polypropylene can only be recycled once.

aaron695 5y ago

> Something is killing gray whales The article showed a real maturity for the media. It was specific, not whales, grey whales. If you want to know why they are dying look at the comments. They don't care. Many can't even be bothered to mention whales. Mostly not one iota of care is given to grey whales. This is the war to be fought. The environmentalist, they are destroying the plant one species at a time. They won't win, but we will lose much while the environmental machinery ploughs as much as it can into the ground to keep it's control.

pvaldes 5y ago

Plastics wouldn't be necessarily my main candidate here. Gray whales are not like other whales. They eat the mud in the bottom and filter it eating the invertebrate burrowers. This means that the big trofic chain of marine scavengers in soft bottoms is disturbed in some way (some way that has been undetected still) or that Eastern Pacific whales of this species have a Fukush... ehem, health, quote, quote, problem. A problem that the Atlantic gray Whales don't have for some reason, it seems.

h2odragon 5y ago

Cats and cows get Covid, why not whales?

batushka3 5y ago

Why no one talks about massif Chinese poaching fleet roaming the oceans. This should be at least in hipotesis list.

JohnWhigham 5y ago
We all want to find a reason why our ocean populations are depleting, but as soon as anyone says China, you're racist (mainly from people on the left, too). This way of thinking and the resulting inaction is going to kill them even faster.
- smcl 5y ago
  That's not true, rogue Chinese trawling fleets fishing illegally are quite widely and openly discussed - there's no real doubt that they exist and have little incentive to bother fishing sustainably. What is frowned upon is just pointing the finger at "China" in general without being specific or even at least a little self-aware. I've seen a lot of pushback on that, and tbh it's pretty fair.