[HN Gopher] Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
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Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
Author : krylon
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-01-20 09:01 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Any article about cardboard standees in japanese aquariums is
| incomplete without reference to Grape-kun, a penguin who fell in
| love with a cardboard cutout from an anime promotion.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape-kun
| ge96 wrote:
| ma hawt, ma soul
| classichasclass wrote:
| We "met" a king penguin at Singapore Bird Paradise that would
| follow people around at the edge of the tank (an acrylic sheet
| separated you from their enclosure) and try to interact. It swam
| up to my wife and followed her around, then went to another bunch
| of people and did the same. It seemed to enjoy watching people
| watching it and waving to it. Not every animal does, but this one
| did.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'm not sure if it applies with all birds, but many seem to
| become fixated on humans. This can happen if you care for very
| young, sick or injured birds. My wife cares for various sad
| cases and if she isn't careful they stay with with us. We have
| 4 pigeons at the moment, with various issues. I call them our
| rehoming pigeons. Do you want a pigeon?
| classichasclass wrote:
| Funny enough, my late father was a veterinarian and we had a
| pigeon that we raised from a chick (we weren't sure what this
| thoroughly ugly bird was and it turned out it was a pigeon).
| It was very tame and lived in a hutch on the back porch, and
| would watch for us to come back from the electric pole out
| the front. Unfortunately its knowledge of cats was limited to
| our extremely lazy ones and one day it disappeared; we
| suspect it got eaten.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| We treated a pigeon back to health from a failed cat attack
| - healthy enough to eat and walk, but not fly. It took a
| while but she eventually fully regained her ability to fly.
|
| She had some rather distinct markings and would hang around
| the house pretty regularly after that. Then one day outside
| she was getting seriously groomed by a larger pigeon and
| wow is that where that term comes from?
|
| Anyhow yeah she returned the grooming (which I'd later look
| up was her way of saying 'yeah I'm down - let's go') and I
| never saw her, or him, again.
|
| So yeah - there could've been a happier ending there,
| especially because when a cat does eat a pigeon there tends
| to be evidence left.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| I became friends with a mallard while living near a pond,
| he would follow me when I walked to the bus stop, and greet
| me while on my way home (closer to home, he wouldn't
| typically leave the apartment complex, thankfully).
|
| one year, he disappeared, which added a lot of sadness to
| my life. that summer, he reappeared and walked up a hill to
| greet me, with his mate and ducklings in tow. his mate had
| had a shattered (and repaired) beak, and was easy to pick
| out, and he spent time walking between us with "quack quack
| quack", back and forth, as if to introduce us. they stayed
| around at least until I moved a year or so later. by far
| the most profound experience I've had with a "wild" animal,
| a memorable experience that I will continue to cherish.
| weakfish wrote:
| This made me smile, thank you for sharing!
| hinkley wrote:
| Some of them fixate on one kind of person. They have a type.
|
| I knew someone who got a bird at a pet store. The bird's
| favorite caretaker looked like a younger version of my
| friend. So the bird was intrigued. When she surrendered the
| bird about five years later, the girlfriend of the man
| running the sanctuary also had the same hair color and skin
| tone. So again the bird was eager to check out the new
| person. Most other people could fuck right off.
| shashanoid wrote:
| :(
| rubiquity wrote:
| I've encountered a couple of these Sunfish ("Mola mola") in the
| wild off the coast of Southern California. They're absolutely
| incredible to see in person and massive! While it seemed to enjoy
| our presence we made sure not to get too close or they might
| mistake your boat for a rock and try to flop on board, which is
| the only way they've ever killed a human. I've read they move to
| warmer waters as they age and the ones I saw were "only" around
| 800-1200 pounds. The ones around Indonesia can be 3000 pounds or
| more. Fascinating creature.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Also, they famously carry a huge number of parasites. This just
| seems normal for the species, similar to how sloth fur supports
| a variety of organisms.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It's normal for all species, humans included. We generally
| aren't carrying large loads of parasites, but that's not
| because not doing so is normal. It's because we put
| tremendous effort into getting rid of them. This is one of
| the theories for why human body temperature seems to have
| lowered since the measurement was standardized at 37 C.
|
| There was a poem written about the phenomenon:
|
| _Big fleas have little fleas
|
| upon their backs to bite 'em
|
| And little fleas have lesser fleas
|
| and so ad infinitum_
| DFHippie wrote:
| The version I recall has "upon their knees to bite 'em".
| Maybe my juvenile brain made up that internal rhyme the
| better to remember it.
| dang wrote:
| Written by de Morgan of de Morgan's Laws!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonaptera_(poem)
|
| But he lifted the genius part of it from Jonathan Swift.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The ones I've seen get scared pretty easily, and when scared
| will rocket off awfully fast.
| world2vec wrote:
| These animals yearn for their mates.
|
| I understand the conservation aspect of aquariums and all the
| good things that come out of it (research, etc) but it still
| makes me a bit sad when I read things like this.
| HPMOR wrote:
| I yearn for my mate... but do they yearn for me?
| ysavir wrote:
| I agree with you. The older I get, the less and less tolerant I
| become of the concept of zoos and aquariums.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| The better ones take really good care of the animals within.
|
| And I think they serve an important and not-irreplaceable
| purpose - exposure. They help show ordinary people, many of
| whom live in cities with no exposure to real nature, just
| what out there is worth protecting. I think it helps build
| public support for things like reducing waste, better fishing
| and hunting practices, the importance of parks and preserves,
| wildlife crossings, etc.
|
| Sure, you can see them on your phone. But the result is
| completely different than seeing them with your own eyes.
| riffraff wrote:
| They ma provide good care, but how good can care be? A
| large animal would probably roam vast distances all the
| time and there's no way a zoo can allow that. Plus climate.
|
| Polar bears at the zoo on plastic ice may be the saddest
| thing I've seen in my life, but how are you gonna provide
| tons and tons of ice for miles in a warm climate?
| hinkley wrote:
| I think it's better to think of zoos and arboretums and
| sanctuaries as embassies than as conservation.
|
| Except in the direst of circumstances, your connection with
| that experience of seeing an African Elephant is a much more
| potent predictor for survival of the species than the benefit
| of having the elephant here where poaching is nonexistent but
| gene inheritance is complicated and limited. The star power of
| the animals triggers positive steps and slows or stops negative
| ones.
|
| There's a conservation group I was involved with who thought
| they were going to save the world with a half dozen acres of
| land. The longer I knew them the more I realized that some of
| them didn't mean it figuratively. I love them but that's
| deranged. Meanwhile I treated it the way I think of zoos. That
| first hand experience re-establishing a human connection with
| Nature. The first or second domino in a long series of
| dominoes.
| carabiner wrote:
| I wish I was that sunfish.
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| You wish you were in prison?
| dni0 wrote:
| Want me to print you some friends? :)
| James_K wrote:
| Zoos are really quite cruel.
| calf wrote:
| Zoos are a lesser evil argument, locally they are not the best
| for the animals but they provide globally long-term benefits
| for humans and nature as well.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| What's the alternative? The implied greater evil?
|
| A world with no zoos and less appreciation and consideration
| for nature as well as the long term necessity of caring for
| it?
|
| I'm wondering about creating more nature parks instead of
| zoos. Of course not as accessible for people in cities, but
| could be a much better compromise.
|
| In general, we should avoid putting animals in small cages as
| much as possible.
| daveslash wrote:
| Speaking of nature parks instead of zoos, the San Diego
| Wild Safari Park is just that. Very large enclosed pastures
| with multiple species living alongside each other.
| James_K wrote:
| The implication here is that it would be impossible to fund
| conservation without zoos. As a counter argument: we could
| just do it. Increase taxes by the amount people spend in zoos
| and spend that on conservation. The only argument in favour
| of the zoo over that other approach is that people want to
| look at animals in cages.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > As a counter argument: we could just do it. Increase
| taxes by the amount people spend in zoos and spend that on
| conservation.
|
| Why do you think we could do that?
|
| I say we could just increase taxes by $5,000 per person per
| year and spend it on breeding and releasing mosquitoes in
| Los Angeles.
| James_K wrote:
| Yes, we could do that, but what would be the benefit? I'm
| saying that whether we want nature conserved and whether
| we want them to be in cages for us to look at are
| entirely separate issues that should be evaluated
| separately. The best argument in favour of zoos is
| assuming that the people who want to look at dancing
| bears would be sufficiently enraged by their absence that
| they would decide to condemn the whole of nature in not
| doing conservation.
|
| As for why I think we could do it, the answer is because
| we obviously can. The world become a much worse place
| once you realise the many things of which humanity is
| capable, yet which we choose not to do.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Most zoos nowadays are important research centers.
|
| Besides that, they have an important educational component that
| surely contributes politically for conservation efforts.
| daveslash wrote:
| Big Zoos, yes. And they do some great research, as well as
| preservation and rehabilitation. But I've also been to a few
| small zoos in rural America that are essentially someone's
| private animal collection that they charge you a fee to see.
| I think those are less common than they used to be, but they
| do exist.
| theultdev wrote:
| I don't think those can be considered zoos from your
| description.
|
| And maybe stop going to them (you went to a few?) and they
| will become even less common.
|
| Never seen one of those, but there's plenty of private
| animal habitats I've seen that take injured and stray
| animals.
|
| Usually just ran/funded by someone who loves animals.
| James_K wrote:
| False dichotomy. If we wanted to, we could do both
| preservation and not lock them up.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Poor fish
| neilv wrote:
| Is it loneliness, or stimulus deprivation? The tank looks barren
| in the photo.
| londons_explore wrote:
| They live in the middle of big oceans. Whenever I've found one
| in the wild, there is nothing nearby, so I imagine an empty
| tank is the best way to replicate that.
| rurp wrote:
| I'm surprised to see so many comments solely about how
| aquariums/zoos are cruel and feeling sorry for this particular
| fish, when it's a species that is regularly hunted. I wouldn't
| want to be locked in a cage/tank either, but by ending up in a
| well run aquarium this sunfish is doing better than 99.999% of
| sunfish that have encountered humans.
|
| This isn't a screed against eating fish or meat; I eat both.
| There are a lot of unethical practices in these industries that
| I'd like to see greatly improved, but putting a few individuals
| in an enclosure where there is at least some research and
| educational value seems like not even a rounding error on the
| state of animal welfare.
| observationist wrote:
| Being cared for by conscientious humans, providing enrichment
| and variety, can be better than living in the wild. For any
| animal, living in the wild, life span tends to be short, and
| life tends to be brutal. Prey animals are hunted, and they
| scrounge for food; finding a steady, reliable, nutritious, and
| tasty source of food in the wild is vanishingly rare. Dealing
| with parasites, illness, injury, predation, and all the other
| stress and constant threats to life is why wild animals are
| dangerous. Peaceful, fulfilling, life is incredibly rare.
|
| It's even incredibly rare for humans - we're currently in an
| age of plenty and abundance, with more people living better
| lives than at any other point in the history of our species.
|
| Overfishing and the geopolitical nature of enforcement and
| exploitation aren't something we can affect at an individual
| level, but these aquarium staff are doing a good thing, making
| a pretty good life for a sunfish. An actual companion would be
| better, but as long as the cutouts are triggering relief for
| whatever social needs being affected, that's a good deal for
| the sunfish.
| daveslash wrote:
| I was commenting to my wife the other day... it seems to me
| that there are very few wild animals that just die from being
| too old. Not an expert, but it seems to me that most animals
| in the wild live until they are brutally ripped apart and
| eaten alive by another animal, and it's only a matter of time
| -- very rarely reaching an age old enough to just die.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| The interesting thing is predator and prey both die when
| they get too slow. Not sure which side has a worse ending
| there! Then there's disease or even a simple scratch
| getting infected.
|
| The world's a brutal place, probably all worlds. Because
| the very nature of evolution means species that exploit the
| most thrive the most. The obvious exception of things like
| a solar feeding plant isn't even an exception. The great
| oxidation event caused one of the greatest mass extinctions
| on the planet - we evolved to thrive on oxygen but for most
| of the other life alive at the time it'd be like if plants
| today produced cyanide gas.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Predators tend to have a thinner margin.
|
| Even a slight injury to a predator can mean a slow death
| by starvation.
|
| That's why videogame predators are so ridiculous. They
| keep coming after you, even when half their ass is blown
| away. A real predator will bugger off, as soon as it
| figures out that there might be a cost to attacking you.
| That's a big reason that many herbivore defenses seem
| kind of ridiculous, but work. They just need to make the
| predator nervous. Unless the predator is starving, it's
| likely to seek prey elsewhere.
|
| There's also tremendous competition between predators.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Very few other animals put energy (either directly or
| through abstractions like "money", "welfare", and
| "centralized monopolies on the legitimate use of violence")
| into sustaining members of the species/group that can no
| longer defend and feed themselves.
|
| Humans in the developed world do this so well that very few
| of them are even required to defend and feed themselves
| without these abstractions.
| mongol wrote:
| I think this is probably right. But does that mean that
| cancer, cardivascular disease, ALS, Parkinson, etc etc
| human diseases are incredibly rare among animals?
| scottLobster wrote:
| The internet in general finds the black in the rainbow, Hacker
| News is typically better in quality of argument as it tends to
| attract a more intellectual crowd, but the overall tendency is
| the same.
|
| Additionally, most of us are taught "hurting things is bad" as
| children and many adults have a hard time reconciling that we
| have to intentionally hurt at least some living things to live,
| hurt an even greater amount of living things to flourish, and
| at a certain point decreasing suffering in one dimension
| increases it in another.
|
| For those who haven't developed a more mature framework, they
| tend to revert to the childhood "hurting things is bad" lesson,
| and an alternative framework based on nuance and context around
| suffering is too emotionally painful for them to accept, even
| if they can intellectually admit to the logic.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> is typically better in quality of argument as it tends to
| attract a more intellectual crowd_
|
| On behalf of the more intellectual crowd, I'm obliged to
| devastatingly elucidate that we're (quite singularly) more
| intrinsically adept at forcefully projecting _ex post facto_
| rationalizations upon our--invariably and universally--
| emotional decision-making processes whilst obfuscating the
| same under an avalanche of loquacious hifalutinisms.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| Agree. There's a provocative word you don't mention: hypocrisy.
|
| This has become my reflexive internal response when I hear
| complaining about small-beer animal cruelty. Why are we so
| quick to empathize with this sunfish, and so slow to do it for
| creatures whose products most of us eat every single day? The
| horror show of factory farming creates many orders of magnitude
| more suffering than all these little anecdotes put together.
|
| Zoos are cruel? Hypocrisy. Circuses are cruel? Hypocrisy.
| Bullfighting is cruel? Hypocrisy. Euthanizing stray dogs is
| cruel? Hypocrisy. Using animals in a film shoot is cruel?
| Hypocrisy. Keeping a single guinea pig is cruel? Hypocrisy (but
| against the law in Germany). And so on.
|
| People in developed countries have become very good at dealing
| with cognitive dissonance.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I've seen some very large farms and they didn't seem like a
| horror show to me. Maybe they exist somewhere but I'm
| starting to get the feeling that "factory farm" is a term
| that people throw out to conjure a mental image of something
| that doesn't actually exist (or is the exception rather than
| the rule).
| zargon wrote:
| If factory farms were so benign, they wouldn't need laws
| designed to encumber whistleblowers.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag
| tensor wrote:
| The issue is about whether the animal is forced to endure pain,
| not weather we eat it or not. The same is true for how we keep
| the animals we eat, and why people are rightfully upset about
| how some cows and chickens and the like are kept during their
| short lives before slaughter.
|
| Essentially, having the animal be free before we catch and
| immediately and hopefully quickly kill it for food is fine.
| Keeping it in a zoo where it's not suffering is fine.
|
| Keeping it in poor conditions before we kill and eat it is not
| fine. Keeping it in poor conditions in a zoo is not fine.
|
| This story is interesting in that it gives insight into the
| mental state of these zoo animals, something that is often hard
| for the public to see and understand. It _should_ make you
| pause to consider if we 're really keeping these animals in
| humane conditions, given that apparently even fish have
| possibly more complex internal mental states than we assume.
| mhb wrote:
| An alternative last resort could have been to let small groups of
| real people in to see the sunfish during renovations. It could
| even be a PR thing with a lottery or something for the lucky
| sunfish companions.
| tender_vittles wrote:
| it's a fucking baby wheel man!!
|
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0IQCLQDfKw)
| tender_vittles wrote:
| It's a fucking baby wheel man!!
|
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0IQCLQDfKw)
| somishere wrote:
| During the pandemic / lockdown I was lucky enough to visit one of
| the reef pontoons off Cairns (Australia, on the Great Barrier
| Reef) that had been shut for several months. The resident Maori
| wrasse (a very large fish) at this pontoon, and others, has been
| known to have a relationship with some of the regular staff -
| often rubbing up against them in the water. When we jumped in the
| water that day the fish's reaction was the wildest thing I've
| ever seen. It was like a small puppy who has been locked inside
| all day. It literally jumped into my arms, flapping its tail to
| get closer. I'm going to repeat - this is a big fish, maybe a
| metre long and stocky, covered in a nice thick layer of slime. It
| would then swim away and come back and rub up against us. It did
| this to all three of us in the group ... only one of us was a
| regular. She hung with us for the whole snorkel and it was a bit
| sad when we had to get out of the water. Amazing experience. Made
| me feel differently about wrasses, that's for sure.
| why_at wrote:
| While I was scuba diving in Belize with some friends we
| encountered some Goliath Grouper which would follow us around.
| Later we were amazed when we saw another diver hold out her
| arms to one and it swam right up to her so she could hold it
| and pet it. Keep in mind this was a massive fish that probably
| weighed as much as a person.
|
| We asked her about it afterwards, turns out they just like
| being petted :). Eventually got to try it out ourselves on
| another dive, fish can be really friendly.
| somishere wrote:
| Wow. We have a "Queensland" Grouper here .. similar size to
| the goliath, but there is no way I would hug it. A mate was a
| skipper of a dive boat and went for a freedive on their break
| - got a little bit too close to one that was chilling under
| the vessel. It opened it's mouth and sucked their head in.
| Happened very quickly. This person has a pretty decent breath
| hold, and experienced all round. But they thought that was it
| - all over. Until they were promptly spat out - never to
| venture within 10m of a fish that size again.
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