[HN Gopher] Animation of a blue whale trying to avoid ships
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Animation of a blue whale trying to avoid ships
Author : 3super3
Score : 116 points
Date : 2021-02-13 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.independent.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.independent.co.uk)
| witherk wrote:
| I'm open to an explanation. But, I think a lot of the effect of
| the animation is created by the dots representing the whale and
| ships being huge. In reality the dots would be tiny and almost
| never come into visible range of each other.
| ryeights wrote:
| And the massive trails on the ships! What purpose does that
| serve other than to mislead?
| edoceo wrote:
| I thought it was wake indicator or intended as a tracer
| runarberg wrote:
| On twitter they say it is an indicator of speed. If sound
| is the main culprit in deterring the whale from the natural
| pattern, then it makes sense for a faster moving ships to
| have a more dramatic visual weight. That is a whale should
| be just as stressed of hearing something loud come at it
| with a high speed as we would be at seeing something big
| come at us on high speed.
| hansvm wrote:
| Shipping noise can travel much further underwater than through
| the air. If the effect being shown is real then I wouldn't be
| shocked if sound were the culprit.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Furthermore, vessel noise has been shown [1] to be
| significantly detrimental to several species of whale
| already.
|
| [1] https://www.sanjuanjournal.com/news/how-vessel-noise-
| affects...
| arendtio wrote:
| I don't think the animation type influences the information in
| a misleading way and I think that the suggested effect is real.
|
| Whales use sound to gather information about their surroundings
| rather than sight. So it isn't about visibility range, but
| rather about auditory range. In addition, sound travels at a
| different speed under water (I don't know how it affects the
| range).
|
| The movie 'The last Giants' [1] is a documentation about the
| whales in the Strait of Gibraltar. While I don't think it is a
| particular good movie (too emotional), I think the basic
| information presented, gives a good impression of how whales
| are affected by modern ships. It is cruel.
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1470753/
| ss64 wrote:
| In addition to the diesel engine noise most of these ships
| are running sonar systems which affect marine mammals
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar#Effect_on_marine_mammals
| [deleted]
| heliodor wrote:
| The size and shape of the trails is misleading. If this is
| caused by sound waves, then they should use circles around
| each ship.
| runarberg wrote:
| Thats not the point. I'm sure whales can hear the doppler
| shifts just as easily--or even easier--then we. And I'm
| sure they can deduce the direction and speed of a vessel
| just as well. And I'm sure being in the line of attack of
| something really big and really fast moving is just as
| stressful for a whale as it is for us.
| feanaro wrote:
| I'm not actually able to find the animation in the article. Not a
| good source.
| Kuinox wrote:
| It's litteraly the first piece of content.
| swimfar wrote:
| But the last piece of content to load for me.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Use uBlock origin and it will load right after the text of
| the article.
| sm4rk0 wrote:
| There's just a black rectangle at the top of the page when
| opened with Firefox for Android or Firefox Klar (Focus for
| German-speaking countries, telemetry disabled by default) --
| even with tracking protection off.
|
| Edit: turning uBlock Origin off helped!
| Kuinox wrote:
| I run firefox on PC and have a uBlock origin with a lot of
| list enabled, plus privacy badger. I can see the video with
| uBlock origin.
| ju-st wrote:
| For me, not even turning off ublock origin in Firefox
| worked. The animation was only visible in Chrome (with
| ublock origin activated).
| matt-attack wrote:
| I think to properly interpret this, you'd need to see a control
| case where the same whale is the same or similar area with zero
| ships. Do they normally just swim in that pattern? Perhaps that's
| the normal manner in which they troll for krill.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Sadly I don't think we can get that control case without
| shutting down all shipping in a huge area.
| learnstats2 wrote:
| I don't need a control case to observe that the whale's
| movement pattern _at least_ identifies the drawn wakes.
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| It's sped up and edited, sure. But as (relatively) simple
| visualisations go, that was pretty emotional.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Maybe more emotional than it needs to be though. In real time
| the whale would have hours or even days to get out of the way.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Folks in this thread are real quick to dismiss any concern
| for the animal and it's habitat and that's pretty sad. Is it
| so hard to believe human activity is harming these animals?
| imtringued wrote:
| It's very easy to believe and it has absolutely nothing to
| do with the speed and motion of ships and instead with the
| presence of sonar and engine and propeller noises.
| ben509 wrote:
| It's not an inability to believe it's true. It's more being
| burnt out by ritualized concern. It comes from seeing
| something awful that we're all supposed to be concerned
| about, listening to people beat their chest about it, and
| then the next day it's something else and those people have
| moved on to that and forgotten about yesterday's crisis.
| corobo wrote:
| Fuck me, Independent. I've not got all day.
|
| Want to load some content in at any point or are we just gonna
| get a few more random videos and other guff loaded in first?
| economusty wrote:
| Seems like the long trail on the ships is misleading, the whale
| arrived to the position of the ships long after they are gone.
| Emendo wrote:
| Each travelling ship leaves behind a tail that's much longer than
| what I would expect if it was meant to represent the wake. Does
| anyone know the significance of the tail?
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Amp built in without the normal way to remove it from the url and
| get a normal page!? No thank you, not worth viewing then. When
| did the independent start doing that?
| ornornor wrote:
| "That's horrible!" Most people say while reading this on their
| way to the sushi restaurant. We're ruining the world for all
| living things (and ourselves but we don't seem to have fully
| grasped it yet). I have nothing to add except that it's very sad.
| I could say "quit buying fish if you're at all concerned about
| the situation" but I expect to be downvoted to oblivion for
| stating such a radical idea.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Plenty of us are vegan and think human influence on animal
| habitats is horrible. I can't tell if you're projecting your
| own unwillingness to make change onto others.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| Didn't watch, took too long to load. Let this be a lesson to web
| developers.
| glenneroo wrote:
| Someone else[0] posted a twitter link to the animation.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125020
| phaedrus wrote:
| I couldn't even figure out where the animation was among all
| the ads.
| sm4rk0 wrote:
| Alt source:
|
| https://twitter.com/ballenaschile/status/1356703048270249985
| mrfusion wrote:
| What region is this? What does it look like in real time? It's a
| bit misleading to speed it up 1000x.
| elSidCampeador wrote:
| Surely ships' wakes don't go on for that long? What would the
| image look like if the tracers of the ships were reduced to a
| quarter of their size, which would be much closer to reality?
| runarberg wrote:
| On twitter they explain the tail represents speed, not wake.
|
| https://twitter.com/NiklasAstrand/status/1358321916369592321
| thegreyone wrote:
| Globalization is so unnatural. Humans need to learn to make do
| with what has been placed in their own, natural habitats. No more
| unnatural migration. No more globalization. It's killing the
| planet and all the bio-diversity nature has blessed us with. I
| can't imagine the terror this whale is experiencing. We need to
| learn to live within the confines of nature. That needs to be
| enough.
| joncrane wrote:
| 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.
| ajnin wrote:
| 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.
| shkkmo wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| scubazealous wrote:
| 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.
|
| Lastly, here is a video of a scuba diver underneath a freighter
| to give an idea of what goes on underwater.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIPMfHUIVvk
|
| [0]https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/shipping-lanes-are-
| getti...
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| I saw it too there.
|
| 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.
| notjtrig wrote:
| 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.
| bartread wrote:
| > ...and I feel it's disingenuous.
|
| 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.
| partingshots wrote:
| Are there any reputable news publications you read?
| Subscription required is fine.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| 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.
| arendtio wrote:
| 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.
| atoav wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| How do you explain the 50km wakes?
| darkerside wrote:
| 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?
| gibbonsrcool wrote:
| Half speed... so we take half a week to watch it?
| atoav wrote:
| 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
| dan-robertson wrote:
| 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
| darkerside wrote:
| 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.
| chmod775 wrote:
| 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.
| learnstats2 wrote:
| 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| > It's sped up and meant to make it look like the whale is
| frantically trying to escape while being hemmed in by ships,
|
| When I watched the video at full speed I thought: this whale
| doesn't give a damn if there are other ships nearby
|
| When I watched the video at 1/10 speed my opinion didn't
| change. Except the video was boring. You are reading too much
| into this video.
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