5 ms·

Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries

79 points by gmays 6mo ago

warumdarum 6mo ago
Ah, nature thats more like it. Less wholesome, more cthullu.
- WesolyKubeczek 6mo ago
  It is both.
delichon 6mo ago
I once lived in an apartment in Colorado with a balcony overlooking a pond. Once a grebe was paddling around in it followed by four chicks. It was a great image for the Colorado Tourism Office. Then mamma grebe swam back and swallowed the fourth chick whole, and the smaller family paddled away. Brood reduction isn't common in grebes, but I saw it anyway, and thought maybe I didn't get the straight dope from Disney movies growing up.
- jimbob45 6mo ago
  https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worlds-collide-0-8 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worl... Same energy as this short story.
  - Modified3019 6mo ago
    That was a fun read, thanks.
    - yreg 6mo ago
      You might like HPMOR by the same author if you don't mind the length. https://hpmor.com/ https://hpmor.com/
- 9991 6mo ago
  You're not yourself when you're hungry.
- TimByte 6mo ago
  Yeah, nature has a way of very quickly correcting the version of itself we picked up from cartoons
- hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
  When I was in college I worked in a lab where part of my job was killing rats (I actually had a real moral problem that the general term used for the killing of lab animals at this time was "sacrificing", e.g. "I sac'ed that litter of rats yesterday", because it felt like a way to lessen ones natural emotional guilt at the task. Not sure if that term is still used today.) I really had a moral quandary in what I did, even moreso because I felt a visceral disgust (like I actually threw up a bit) the first time I had to kill a rat and then cut off its head with a pair of scissors, but after I got used to it I had no problem with it - I came to understand how people can get used to doing things they originally found morally reprehensible, and it scared me about myself. Anyway, I always found my guilt was assuaged at least a little bit if a mama rat would eat one of the babies by herself. "Hey, I'm no worse than the mom!" I'd say to myself. Then I felt a lot worse when I came to understand that moms tend to eat their babies when under high stress or when they think a baby is sick, which was probably a result of living in the lab in the first place.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - hackeraccount 6mo ago
    I worked with a guy who had an internship studying the effects of some drug on rats. He said he didn't have much of a problem killing the rats but also claimed that he knew his dog realized what he was up to at work. It made me think he might have had more of a problem with it then he thought.
  - j_bum 6mo ago
    Yes, the term is “sacrificed” is unfortunately used today in many research labs in the US. My advisor had a *strict* policy against people using that terminology in the lab and in his department. “We sometimes euthanize or kill animals in a part of the difficult process of research. We do not sacrifice them - we are not making offerings to some deity. We are conducting research, not participating in a religion.” “Sacrifice” is a euphemism that serves only to disconnect the ethical and emotional burden of killing animals for research [0]. And I deeply sympathize with your ethical and emotional guilt. The research I did in my PhD contributed to the foundational knowledge in my field, but not without severe and serious tolls. The way people become normalized to euthanasia in research environments is scary. [0] https://openworks.mdanderson.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/word2024/article/1001/&path_info=2024_02_sacrificed_euthanized_FINAL.pdf https://openworks.mdanderson.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=...
- rob74 6mo ago
  There's also siblicide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siblicide#In_birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siblicide#In_birds): > In these three booby species, hatching order indicates chick hierarchy in the nest. The A-chick is dominant to the B-chick, which in turn is dominant to the C chick, etc. (when there are more than two chicks per brood). Masked booby and Nazca booby dominant A-chicks always begin pecking their younger sibling(s) as soon as they hatch; moreover, assuming it is healthy, the A-chick usually pecks its younger sibling to death or pushes it out of the nest scrape within the first two days that the junior chick is alive. Blue-footed booby A-chicks also express their dominance by pecking their younger sibling. However, unlike the obligately siblicidal masked and Nazca booby chicks, their behavior is not always lethal. A study by Lougheed and Anderson (1999) reveals that blue-footed booby senior chicks only kill their siblings in times of food shortage.
ivan888 6mo ago
The ending reminds me of the “Americans are obsessed with protein” article
zabzonk 6mo ago
Perhaps this is somewhat like male lions killing cubs that are not immediately theirs? Do the seals kill their own pups? Difficult to study, I guess.
- no-name-here 6mo ago
  Unlikely based on diffuse paternity per claude https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176321
pierrec 6mo ago
Oddly enough, I've seen a similar injury on a dolphin before. Well, the head was missing, but the cutoff point could be described as "corkscrew". None of us had a good idea of the cause, but this hints it may have been predation or scavenging.
rixed 6mo ago
I find the final question about human intervention fascinating. The scientists aren’t recommending intervention, even if the perpetrators tend to be the same few individuals. “We don’t know how natural it is,” says Ursula Siebert, a veterinary pathologist specializing in wildlife population health at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover who was not involved with the work. “It can definitely be hard to watch,” Langley adds. “But the life of a seal—and indeed any wild animal—is tough.” This idea that human influence over nature should not reach beyond species boundaries, that there is no universal value common to several species, seems prevalent in natural sciences. Is it coming from an understandable but misleading distrust of human society and idealisation of "nature", or from a deeper understanding that "nature always knows better", I can't decide.
- denkmoon 6mo ago
  We’ve a storied history of making ecological interventions without fully understanding the consequences. Doing the work to fully understand the consequences is time consuming and expensive. IMO it comes a position of leaving well enough alone.
- nerdsniper 6mo ago
  The mature view is that it boils down to the “Chesterton’s Fence” concept. Rather than “humans bad, nature good”, we just don’t know if the result of intervention might be an unfit population / ecosystem. The result of this, of course, is that we tend to intervene a lot when humans are affected (massive industrial footprints, screw-worms, etc) and a lot less when it’s irrelevant to human welfare. We are, by nature, biased towards the anthropic.
- oaiey 6mo ago
  I always read this as: when something is doomed by itself, it is the normal unaltered way of things. Let it flow.
- TimByte 6mo ago
  I think it's less "nature knows better" and more "we usually don't know enough"
btilly 6mo ago
I am curious why the killers didn't eat more. Is this just the choicest bits - another pup is easy to find?
- steve_adams_86 6mo ago
  As I understood it, the blubber is being eaten and the rest is left. The sheer number of carcasses makes me wonder if this blubber is relatively easy to extract using this method, so they kind of rove through the herd and pick the low hanging fruit, so to speak
TimByte 6mo ago
What's striking here is how long a "known" explanation can persist simply because it sounds plausible
nomilk 6mo ago
> The males may be seeking added nutrients in high-calorie blubber to boost their mating value during the breeding season, a time when bulls usually fast, Langley speculates. Wonder if the male killer is of the same bloodline? Lions often opportunistically kill offspring of other males to reduce competition for their own offspring and to bring females into estrous. EDIT: FWIW I asked claude and it says > Gray seals have a promiscuous, harem-based mating system, but paternity is diffuse and males don't guard specific females long-term the way lions do. A bull has little way of "knowing" which pups are his rivals' offspring vs. his own. So seems unlikely (according to claude).

79 points by gmays 6mo ago

warumdarum 6mo ago

Ah, nature thats more like it. Less wholesome, more cthullu.

WesolyKubeczek 6mo ago
It is both.

delichon 6mo ago

I once lived in an apartment in Colorado with a balcony overlooking a pond. Once a grebe was paddling around in it followed by four chicks. It was a great image for the Colorado Tourism Office. Then mamma grebe swam back and swallowed the fourth chick whole, and the smaller family paddled away. Brood reduction isn't common in grebes, but I saw it anyway, and thought maybe I didn't get the straight dope from Disney movies growing up.

jimbob45 6mo ago
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worlds-collide-0-8 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worl... Same energy as this short story.
- Modified3019 6mo ago
  That was a fun read, thanks.
  - yreg 6mo ago
    You might like HPMOR by the same author if you don't mind the length. https://hpmor.com/ https://hpmor.com/
9991 6mo ago
You're not yourself when you're hungry.
TimByte 6mo ago
Yeah, nature has a way of very quickly correcting the version of itself we picked up from cartoons
hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
When I was in college I worked in a lab where part of my job was killing rats (I actually had a real moral problem that the general term used for the killing of lab animals at this time was "sacrificing", e.g. "I sac'ed that litter of rats yesterday", because it felt like a way to lessen ones natural emotional guilt at the task. Not sure if that term is still used today.) I really had a moral quandary in what I did, even moreso because I felt a visceral disgust (like I actually threw up a bit) the first time I had to kill a rat and then cut off its head with a pair of scissors, but after I got used to it I had no problem with it - I came to understand how people can get used to doing things they originally found morally reprehensible, and it scared me about myself. Anyway, I always found my guilt was assuaged at least a little bit if a mama rat would eat one of the babies by herself. "Hey, I'm no worse than the mom!" I'd say to myself. Then I felt a lot worse when I came to understand that moms tend to eat their babies when under high stress or when they think a baby is sick, which was probably a result of living in the lab in the first place.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- hackeraccount 6mo ago
  I worked with a guy who had an internship studying the effects of some drug on rats. He said he didn't have much of a problem killing the rats but also claimed that he knew his dog realized what he was up to at work. It made me think he might have had more of a problem with it then he thought.
- j_bum 6mo ago
  Yes, the term is “sacrificed” is unfortunately used today in many research labs in the US. My advisor had a *strict* policy against people using that terminology in the lab and in his department. “We sometimes euthanize or kill animals in a part of the difficult process of research. We do not sacrifice them - we are not making offerings to some deity. We are conducting research, not participating in a religion.” “Sacrifice” is a euphemism that serves only to disconnect the ethical and emotional burden of killing animals for research [0]. And I deeply sympathize with your ethical and emotional guilt. The research I did in my PhD contributed to the foundational knowledge in my field, but not without severe and serious tolls. The way people become normalized to euthanasia in research environments is scary. [0] https://openworks.mdanderson.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/word2024/article/1001/&path_info=2024_02_sacrificed_euthanized_FINAL.pdf https://openworks.mdanderson.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=...
rob74 6mo ago
There's also siblicide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siblicide#In_birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siblicide#In_birds): > In these three booby species, hatching order indicates chick hierarchy in the nest. The A-chick is dominant to the B-chick, which in turn is dominant to the C chick, etc. (when there are more than two chicks per brood). Masked booby and Nazca booby dominant A-chicks always begin pecking their younger sibling(s) as soon as they hatch; moreover, assuming it is healthy, the A-chick usually pecks its younger sibling to death or pushes it out of the nest scrape within the first two days that the junior chick is alive. Blue-footed booby A-chicks also express their dominance by pecking their younger sibling. However, unlike the obligately siblicidal masked and Nazca booby chicks, their behavior is not always lethal. A study by Lougheed and Anderson (1999) reveals that blue-footed booby senior chicks only kill their siblings in times of food shortage.

ivan888 6mo ago

The ending reminds me of the “Americans are obsessed with protein” article

zabzonk 6mo ago

Perhaps this is somewhat like male lions killing cubs that are not immediately theirs? Do the seals kill their own pups? Difficult to study, I guess.

no-name-here 6mo ago
Unlikely based on diffuse paternity per claude https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176321

pierrec 6mo ago

Oddly enough, I've seen a similar injury on a dolphin before. Well, the head was missing, but the cutoff point could be described as "corkscrew". None of us had a good idea of the cause, but this hints it may have been predation or scavenging.

rixed 6mo ago

I find the final question about human intervention fascinating. The scientists aren’t recommending intervention, even if the perpetrators tend to be the same few individuals. “We don’t know how natural it is,” says Ursula Siebert, a veterinary pathologist specializing in wildlife population health at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover who was not involved with the work. “It can definitely be hard to watch,” Langley adds. “But the life of a seal—and indeed any wild animal—is tough.” This idea that human influence over nature should not reach beyond species boundaries, that there is no universal value common to several species, seems prevalent in natural sciences. Is it coming from an understandable but misleading distrust of human society and idealisation of "nature", or from a deeper understanding that "nature always knows better", I can't decide.

denkmoon 6mo ago
We’ve a storied history of making ecological interventions without fully understanding the consequences. Doing the work to fully understand the consequences is time consuming and expensive. IMO it comes a position of leaving well enough alone.
nerdsniper 6mo ago
The mature view is that it boils down to the “Chesterton’s Fence” concept. Rather than “humans bad, nature good”, we just don’t know if the result of intervention might be an unfit population / ecosystem. The result of this, of course, is that we tend to intervene a lot when humans are affected (massive industrial footprints, screw-worms, etc) and a lot less when it’s irrelevant to human welfare. We are, by nature, biased towards the anthropic.
oaiey 6mo ago
I always read this as: when something is doomed by itself, it is the normal unaltered way of things. Let it flow.
TimByte 6mo ago
I think it's less "nature knows better" and more "we usually don't know enough"

btilly 6mo ago

I am curious why the killers didn't eat more. Is this just the choicest bits - another pup is easy to find?

steve_adams_86 6mo ago
As I understood it, the blubber is being eaten and the rest is left. The sheer number of carcasses makes me wonder if this blubber is relatively easy to extract using this method, so they kind of rove through the herd and pick the low hanging fruit, so to speak

TimByte 6mo ago

What's striking here is how long a "known" explanation can persist simply because it sounds plausible

nomilk 6mo ago

> The males may be seeking added nutrients in high-calorie blubber to boost their mating value during the breeding season, a time when bulls usually fast, Langley speculates. Wonder if the male killer is of the same bloodline? Lions often opportunistically kill offspring of other males to reduce competition for their own offspring and to bring females into estrous. EDIT: FWIW I asked claude and it says > Gray seals have a promiscuous, harem-based mating system, but paternity is diffuse and males don't guard specific females long-term the way lions do. A bull has little way of "knowing" which pups are his rivals' offspring vs. his own. So seems unlikely (according to claude).