this poor kid just lost his father and the dumbfuck American is asking "do you hate Americans? do you want to shoot me?" some of yall deserve your fucking ptsds
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.
“I don’t understand why women don’t just press charges if they were really assaulted.”
When I was younger, I was assaulted. It was on tape. When I told my parents, they pushed to press charges. I went through with it.
In court, his lawyer played the video and tried to argue that I wanted it. That I was enjoying it. Sitting there while strangers dissected the worst moment of my life felt like being violated all over again.
It was humiliating.
Then the judge mentioned he had already been charged multiple times before and warned that if he did not change, he would end up on the sex offender registry.
That’s why some women do not press charges.
Because even with evidence, even with a history, even when you are telling the truth, you still end up fighting to prove you were hurt.
My classmate was raped on her way back home from university and got pregnant, but couldn’t get an abortion due to the laws. She had to drop out of university where she was studying medicine. Because of pregnancy and childbirth expenses, she couldn’t continue her studies, left college, started working at a coffee shop, lost the fun of her early twenties, and lost the chance to attend international medical conferences she once dreamt of… all just to give birth to a child she never wanted.
People say, “What if the baby you abort grows up and cures cancer?”
Okay — but what if the 19-year-old you deny an abortion to grows up and cures cancer?
Now she can’t afford to get an education. Instead, she has to take care of a baby. What about her? An actual living human being???
“Abortion ends potential life”… So do property disputes, war, and genocide. You only seem to care about lives when women don’t give birth to them.