Jail Willy: There Are Organized Killer Whale Mafias Making A Living From Crime

June 23, 2017 in Daily Bulletin

According to Wikipedia Orcs are “brutish, aggressive…and generally malevolent species”. That’s not so different from orcas wrote Tristin Hopper:

  • Orcas, or Killer Whales, have learnt that instead of going through the effort of hunting, they can just follow fishing boats and steal their catch.
  • Boats have tried attaching noisemakers to ward off the whales, but they got used to the noise and now actively associate it with free food.
  • One study found that fishing boats are losing up to $500 a day to orca thieves.
  • The mammals have complex social structures and appear to be teaching each other new and innovative ways to steal from fishing boats.
  • The Bearing Sea, off the coast of Alaska, has been ceded to the orcas admits one fisherman.
  • One alternative is pot fishing – where instead of lines, boats turn into giant crab traps. But this has a one-time cost of $600,000 and it’s possible a killer whale will figure out how to get around it.
  • Happily, all this suggests the 1980s moratorium on commercial whaling is working.

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Via: Marginal Revolution