4 ms·
I wonder what kind of gun would you need to chase away an orca. I'm going to assume 9mm wouldn't even penetrate their thick skin and subskin fat.
by glogla 3y ago
I wonder what kind of gun would you need to chase away an orca. I'm going to assume 9mm wouldn't even penetrate their thick skin and subskin fat.
- mattkrause 3y agoI'm skeptical anything (reasonable) would be able to shoot through several feet of water.
- droffel 3y agoHarpoon guns are designed to do exactly that.
- pinkcan 3y agoyea, let's equip boats that can't handle an orca with guns that shoot projectiles through meters of water it's like trying to solve school shooting, by giving teachers guns
- dbish 3y agoSadly this seems to be an approach a large chunk of people actually want to try. Lots of folks out there who are not equipped to make suggestions
- yetanotherloser 3y agoI have never, ever met a yachtsman who wants to carry any kind of anti orca weaponry. Let's not exaggerate here.
- dbish 3y agoLol. Referring to arming teachers not boaters (I’m a sailor myself, yet to hear anyone wanting one)
- yetanotherloser 3y agoAh. Sorry, I got the wrong end of the stick there!
- dbish 3y agoHa. No worries. Anaphoric resolution can be ambiguous. I blame the English language.
- someweirdperson 3y agoMaximum depth of penetration is the ratio of the densities of the projectile and the matter to be penetrated times the length of the projectile. Harpoons have a higher density than water and are quite long, so they work.
- p0pcult 3y ago[dead]
- tempaccount420 3y agoHopefully no one tries to find out. There's only 50k orcas in the world, they're more valuable than us.
- echelon 3y ago> There's only 50k orcas in the world, they're more valuable than us. Species diversity is unquestionably important. This small population of intelligent aquatic mammals is unique and beautiful and valuable. The eons of evolutionary hill climbing that led to them cannot be reproduced. They're a distillation of all that has happened to their lineage up to this point, and that's beautiful. That said, the only apparent species capable of getting us off this rock and avoiding the total annihilation of all life are humans. If we die off and another intelligence emerges later on, all of the easily accessible energy for industrialization and getting us out of the gravity well may be gone. This is our one, best shot. When our sun dies, none of this will have mattered at all. If we're still stuck on this earth, we may as well have never even existed. A brief brilliant flash that led to nothing and was forgotten. The existential counter to that is if we can make it beyond our solar system. Maybe we evolve beyond our current biological forms, maybe computers become our custodians, who knows. Maybe some future super intellect revives all of the state leading up to it, and maybe we'll become (or already are) holographic simulations of what once was: memories of our world. With respect to the geologic timescale and the fate of earth intelligence and biology, humans matter way more than orcas. That isn't to say we shouldn't go to great lengths to preserve orcas. But there's a much bigger story at play, and we shouldn't discount our place in it.
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoIt's not particularly harmful fwiw. A yacht sinking due to an orca would have sunk due to a strong wave. Also it seems the orcas are bored. If Hvaldimir is anything to go by a ball would be a good solution here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hvaldimir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hvaldimir
- yetanotherloser 3y agoThey've not yet shown any sign of being a danger to the hull as far as I know. They pretty often break the rudder off leaving the boat difficult to control. Most long distance sailors would carry some kind of emergency rudder arrangement but more casual coastal types don't usually. Speculation among sailors is that "hey, did you know you can break bits off those things?" is as plausible an explanation as any. There are known ways to scare orcas off but it's illegal to distress them and nobody really wants to. I certainly don't.