I believe I saw this on reddit last week and I feel it's disingenuous. It's sped up and meant to make it look like the whale is frantically trying to escape while being hemmed in by ships, but a more plausible explanation is that the whale is attracted to the wakes of the passing ships.
This speaks to some kind of phenomenon that creates a feeding opportunity for the whale.
Perhaps a marine biologist can speak more intelligently to this.
I am not a marine biologist, but worked in VFX: Of course this is sped up, watching those ships travel their routes in realtime would be a bit like watching paint dry.
Certain aspects/patterns of movement will only become visible when the playback speed is changed (early 20th century theorist Walter Benjamin called this the Optical-Unconscious). So e.g. it is easier to judge patterns in the traffic flow of vehicles in a sped up video than in real time footage. Both display the same movement but something else becomes visible.
You seem to be missing the point of the OP wittingly. It's inconsequential that playing the animation at its normal speed would be a bad idea, what is also important is the effect it will have on an average reader of the Independence, the most obvious impression is that the whale is running for its life, which makes this disingenuous.
I don't know enough about how whales perceive time, distance and the unnatural disturbances coming in with the speed of sound in water to know whether the playback speed is misleading in reflecting the whales feelings or not.
The "obvious impression" you are talking about might not be as obvious as you think it is. For me at least it helped in seeing two interesting patterns: whale roams around and seems to change direction when a ship drives into it's path. Sometimes though it seems to go specifically into the area where a ship "just" drove through.
What was clear to me is that that dot would move differently without ships around it.
The choice of speed seems consciously intended to make it seem more frantic than it is. It's too fast to make out what's going on. If they played it half speed, it would be closer to reality and also easier to see and understand, so why is it this fast?
Or this was the speed things came out when converted to video.
I think attributing this to malice is really not a great move, given that we can only guess here and a lot of people without advanced video knowledge wouldn't make this a conscious choice unless it is much too slow or fast
Another simple hypothesis: a frantic-looking animation is more likely to get upvoted on Reddit so if 5 people posted animations at different speeds, a frantic-looking one might have a better chance at surviving
I often default to arguments like this. But I make an exception when the mistake is both inaccurate and seems to favor the conclusion chosen by the author. They should have realized this and slowed the video to avoid even the appearance of attempting to create a false implication. In my opinion.
That's why I say "seems" instead of "was". I don't want to assume it's on purpose. But I'm sure they had control over the speed of the animation. If they didn't make it look frenetic on purpose, they were incompetent in their attempt to make it describe reality.
If they didn't mean it to seem that way, the responsibility is on them to fix it. This is only my opinion, but I'm sure I'm not alone.
What's your opinion on weather map/satellite images then? You are aware they're not real time and the storms/wind isn't actually moving that fast?
Are the people who make them incompetent? Or would they simply be useless if played back in real time - since you would hardly be able to see any movement at all.
Wow, not sure if I'm being unclear, but I'll try again. This specific animation is issued at a speed that I think is faster than is useful. I think it is more useful and interesting to see the detailed interaction between the whale and an individual boat at a granular level. As played, you see the whale ping pong around between ships, but it's hard to get much of a sense for what is going on. I can't think of another reason for the video being that speed except that they want to imply that the whale is panicked (also the subtext of the study, so not exactly a complete stretch), or that it was an actual oversight that just so happened to make a covert emotional argument that favors their conclusion, which I consider a scientific faux pas.
If you speed up a video of pedestrians at cross-walks it suddenly becomes pedestrians running across the street to avoid being run over by cars going way too fast.
I'd much rather see focus on the whale and its interaction with individual ships. This doesn't show any of that nuance at all, and I don't know why. (But I have ideas)
The result here is that the whale's motion looks frantic, whether it is or not. We can't even tell whether the whale is really interacting with the ships, or interacting with their wake, whether it is really avoiding, or giving chase.
A better solution would be to fast forward (faster) through the uninteresting parts and play the interesting parts close to real-time.
They are not wakes, but speed indicators. I guess there was a choice to represent speed with length bars, as opposed to with color or numbers. Although I would expect length bars to be a natural choice made by a data scientists who is used to think of vectors as a bar with a length and a direction.
They aren't speed indicators, like how you would represent a vector field (e.g. in a quiver plot). If they were they would always be straight lines, and probably be arrows that point in the direction of travel.
The look like wakes. People will assume they are wakes.
I witnessed an interesting phenomenon : invariably when information is presented from some article that hints at either animal intelligence or harmful influence of humans on animals, some armchair commentator will come forward with an alternate explanations that reduces the observed behaviour to a basic mechanistic instinct related to feeding or reproduction or survival. That comment will also be the most upvoted one. The commentator does not present additional information, but for some reason his opinion is given more value than that of the experts who wrote the original study. That phenomenon is particularly prevalent on Reddit.
> The commentator does not present additional information
The commentator pointed out that the video is literally sped up which changes the entire meaning.
Have you considered this has nothing to do with hating animals and entirely to do with hating articles written to create drama and/or crisis where there is none?
The fact that the video is sped up is not new information. It is immediately known when you watch it, it says that the video shows a week in the life of a whale yet the video lasts only 45s. You can only pretend in bad faith that it is not immediately obvious that whales and boats don't travel at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour across the ocean.
The commenter has unsubstabtiated opinion, no expertiese and has brought no extra factual information to support his point the discussion. Its literwlly just soreading FUD
It could be a collective defense mechanism. The idea of animal intelligence being a threat to what many people perceive as the necessary status quo of being able to endlessly consume the resources of nature without consequence.
Disclaimer: Not a marine biologist by trade but took several classes and have close friends in the profession.
What people do not realize is that these whales communicate by sound and have very sensitive hearing. Boats, especially the larger ones you see being used for fishing/shipping generate a lot of noise due to powerful engines and underwater cavitation caused by their propeller spinning. This can drown out whales communications between pods. Researchers are not sure what the long term ramifications of this will be but have observed whales avoiding shipping lanes[0]. It worries me how other marine life, which we do not have the same resources or public support to track, reacts to this.
I was trying to think of an analogy and came up with this: imagine trying to complete grocery shopping in a large store except all the other shoppers are blasting air horns constantly. Of course, you avoid them but it does not matter which aisle you escape to, another shopper will enter and you will need to find another place to avoid the sound.
Its a weird analogy but is the closest to normal life I can come up with.
> Boats, especially the larger ones you see being used for fishing/shipping generate a lot of noise due to powerful engines and underwater cavitation caused by their propeller spinning.
A couple of things. First, that video shows you how relatively quiet the ships are unless you are right underneath the back. You can’t even hear the engine noise towards the front of the ship (which is likely why a ship the size of a city block snuck up on a scuba diver).
Second, propellers on those ships don’t cavitate unless they are misconfigured. Cavitation is inefficient and causes vibration the shipping companies are absolutely incentivized to eliminate.
There are many problems with commercial shipping (the pollution, etc), but the noise is not realistically one of them.
That diver did not have the ship sneak up on him, he was diving in a shipping channel and knew there would be a ship coming up. He prepared by staying next to the large chain on the bottom and holding onto it so he would not be sucked into the propeller. In addition, the reason the ship did not sound "loud" to you is the way gopro records audio. Had this been recorded with a calibrated hydrophone the noise would have been off the charts.
I agree with you the bigger problem is sonar but I hold my opinion the whale in the video swims how it does because it is avoiding the sound of these ships, it is not acting on sight or attracted to wakes/ plankton.
Sound travels differently underwater. A diver senses every sound as if the source is from their own head and all sound sort of blends into one. A whale has a much easier time distinguishing different auditory signals underwater then a diver does. Furthermore, a whale can probably sense the direction the sound comes from and how fast it is moving. A diver failing to notice a giant ship is no evidence that a whale will.
I think you're probably right. Unfortunately that does accurately sum up the quality of reporting in The Independent pretty well.
Every newspaper in the UK has an axe to grind but, in terms of torturing the facts to suit a particular narrative, The Independent is right up there with The Daily Mail and The Express. All of them are really shoddy publications that thoughtful human beings would do well to avoid.
I also am not a marine biologist but your explanation sounds more plausible to me, especially given the size of the area represented on that map. The whale is covering pretty large distances and it's quite clear that a bunch of those movements, and oddly a lot of those where the motion seems to speed up, may well not be triggered at all by the distant movement of ships, or could just as well be it trying to catch up to ships.
Unfortunately I can't answer that with a strong "yes". I've been considering the FT, based on a couple of recommendations (one of which was on here), but you have to go in with your eyes open: it does lean right. Newsweek isn't too bad, and the fact that it's a weekly does give it at least the sense of a bit more distance and objectivity.
The BBC is supposed to be balanced and unopinionated but they implement it in the most passive-aggressive way imaginable. What I mean by that is that sometimes their coverage simply has massive holes in it, which makes it very hard to keep abreast of unfolding events (bear in mind I don't watch the TV channels, only look at the news website). I presume that's because they won't report on something if it would give them impression of bias, but it can be pretty frustrating.
A recent example is the attack on the US Capitol: the BBC's coverage was constantly out of date, missing tons of key information. CNN, The Guardian, plenty of other news sites across the political spectrum, and even Twitter (!) were better sources of information.
Basically the BBC, at present, implements the letter of its charter whilst completely ignoring its spirit. Super-annoying.
The conditions the encourage whale feeding and an analysis of current models for whale movement was the purpose of the study was discussed in the study that collected the data the animation is based on.
Our current best understanding is that whales are drawn to the region due to a thermal fronts in the water and concentrations of chlorophyll (from their food source) that make it easy for the whales to feed efficiently.
If this is a topic that you are curious about, give reading the study a try. I don't think "armchair science" from people that don't bother to read the source material adds much value to any discussion.
I took a ferry once, and the Seagulls followed the ship and prayed on the fish stirred up to the surface by the ships propeller. This is a very plausible explanation.
If the whale would want to follow a ship he would do that. Instead the pattern looks more like he bounces off as soon as he comes close to a ship. Looks more like he wants to avoid ships.
Seagulls on the other hand, have a very different pattern. They also use ships to rest on them and tend to travel along side.
Another commented suggested that it actually might be following to these points/paths as the ship stirs krill or used as distance markers or something. I don't really know if I believe that and haven't had a chance to read the associated study. To be fair, the ocean is a big place so I am a bit skeptical overall.
I do know though, anything from the independent.co.uk URL is almost guarenteed to be heavily sensationalized. Always the most outlandish and emotional headlines. So if it's running here, my first instinct is to just move along.
The ocean is a big place but the animation is a congested area near Chile about 35x35 miles.
I've never sailed the golf of Ancud but in the summer on Long Island Sound in a sailboat you might have to change course 5-10 times a day or more due to traffic, and there not a lot of it.
If you don't see the informal lanes and you're trying to keep away from boats, you could spend the day taking evasive action.
My location relative to other boats is the top thing on my mind out there.
Whales can talk with other whales at several km. I'm unsure about what I'm seeing in the small scaled video, but there is not necessarily a physical collision here. A "Sonic wave collision" is much more probable.
Also the ocean is a 3D mass of water. A sperm whale crossing the path of a ship could be perfectly at 800m of distance while doing it. (Probably not this particular case, I assume that the antenna can only work at surface, but we should take a look to the article methodology before to conclude that the whale is moving to avoid to crash with the ship).
This speaks to some kind of phenomenon that creates a feeding opportunity for the whale.
Perhaps a marine biologist can speak more intelligently to this.