a.

🧉/ ♎️

[a. @bellaadee]

Genuinely terrified of orcas and lepoard seals 😰

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Orcas eat great white sharks. They hunt seals, dolphins, and baby whales. They have never killed a single human in the open ocean. Not once, in all of recorded history.

An orca's brain weighs up to 15 pounds. Yours weighs about 3. They have roughly double the brain cells we do in the regions that handle complex thought. A neuroscientist at Emory named Lori Marino put an orca brain in an MRI and found these animals can tell different species apart underwater. They do it by sending out clicks that bounce off everything around them and come back as a kind of 3D sound map (this is called echolocation). From 500 feet away, an orca knows you're a human and not a seal. It skips you on purpose.

The answer is culture. Orcas around the world are divided into at least 10 separate populations, each with its own food rules, its own language, and its own way of hunting. All of it learned from their mothers. One population eats only fish. Another eats only marine mammals like seals and sea lions. These two populations can live in the exact same water and never swap a single meal. A baby orca learns what food is from its mother, and that list stays the same for life.

In the Pacific Northwest, one population called the Southern Residents eats almost nothing but Chinook salmon. Scientists have documented them killing harbor porpoises 78 times over six decades, carrying the dead porpoises in their mouths, and never once eating them. Even when the group was starving. A 2023 study in Marine Mammal Science looked at all 78 cases and concluded it was play. These orcas would rather go hungry than eat something their culture says isn't food.

Researchers studying whale behavior in 2001 found that orca cultural traditions "appear to have no parallel outside humans." Each family group has its own dialect, its own version of the language. Calves spend about two years just learning how to make all the sounds their family uses. Mothers will slow down a hunt on purpose so their young can watch.

In 2005, a 12-year-old kid was swimming in Helm Bay, Alaska when an orca came at him full speed. At the very last second, the orca seemed to realize it was charging a human. It bent its entire body in half and turned back to open water. In captivity, it goes differently. SeaWorld's Tilikum killed three people during his life in a concrete tank. Research from 2016, published in the journal Animals, traced it to psychological collapse from being locked away from the family bonds orcas need to stay stable.

I think calling this a "mystery" undersells the science. Orcas decide what to eat based on culture, not instinct. No orca mother has ever taught her calf to hunt humans, so no orca hunts humans. Only about 75 of those salmon-eating Southern Residents are still alive. Their pregnancy failure rate is 69% because we've destroyed their salmon runs. They won't break their food culture to survive. Whether we care enough to protect theirs is the part that actually matters.

[a. @bellaadee]

The mashed potatoes i made last might are EXQUISITE!!!!!!!!

[autist @litteralyme0]

waking up for work at 6am so the government can spend $11.3 billion on a pointless war with my taxes

[Dystopian survival @VivetVeritate]

This is a warning sign to humanity

[dr. local angry blk man @afropessimistic]

Renee Nicole Good is the second person who has been killed by ICE this week. In LA, ICE killed Keith Porter in his own home as he celebrated on New Year’s Eve.

[𝒶rα˚˖𓍢ִ໋ @yslmammi]

someone said “nothing gives you a clearer look into someone than how they misinterpret things, every misinterpretation is a confession” and it’s so true because how people misunderstand things can reveal a lot about their perspectives and feelings.

[Dexerto @Dexerto]

Flossie, the world's oldest living cat, turned 30 today

Despite her age, she wakes up early for breakfast, then spends the day napping and playing

[a. @bellaadee]

🥺

[We don't deserve cats 😺 @catsareblessing]

Cats get more attached to people than dogs

[Millionaire Framework @Milli0nairePath]

For anyone starting a new journey

[Rage ❉ @ragecvlt]

You have to let it go.

[a. @bellaadee]

Just realized i left absolutely no room for anybody to gift me anything because i’ve gifted myself everything i want this year, in the materialistic way 😟

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

100 fucking percent. 🎯🎯🎯👇

[Bukola G. @gbukolaaa]

The times I’ve done CPR on real women, it felt completely different because all our training mannequins basically have male chests.but the moment you say healthcare is built around the Caucasian male body, people start yelling “agenda” like it’s not a documented issue. Be serious

[Covie @covie_93]

Do you understand how racist a person must be to remove free access to National Parks on holidays honoring Black people while making it free on his birthday????

[Red Pill Dispenser @redpilldispensr]

"For thousands of years, babies slept with their mothers, and when they cried, they were attended to."

"Until two men came along. Dr. Holt and John B. Watson."

"They basically said babies should be trained, isolated, and controlled. That babies had to fit the assembly line and office schedules of their parents."

[𝐃𝐔𝐓𝐂𝐇 @pr0ud_americans]

These cute little demons are waking up and instantly switching to assassin mode.

Eyes bigger than their brain, head spins 180°, ears doing satellite dish moves… all while fitting in your hand. Nature is insane.

[Matthew @Batman_Beware]

Whoever is president after him is gonna have so much shit to fix it’s not even funny

[💗 @ma1ybe]

Don’t propose on my birthday, don’t propose on my graduation day, don’t propose on Valentine’s Day, don’t propose at someone else’s wedding...
Keep the proposal date a separate special day not be shared with other holidays/milestones