☆꧁༒

kevin shields and i share the same birthday ⁺‧₊˚ ཐི⋆♱⋆ཋྀ ˚₊‧⁺ ☆.𓋼𓍊 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆

[◜ Daily Ceta ◞ 🫍 @cetaology]

I feel like this isn’t talked about enough

GRAY WHALES ARE DYING!!!
There has been over 53 indivuals wash up from Cali , Oregon, and Washington!!!

They are starving! This year has been the deadliest for gray whales outpacing the 2025 150 gray whale deaths.

[☆꧁༒ @swtchbwabe]

getting my eyebrow repierced as an early birthday gift fah mi YAY

[razzle @razzledaxel]

happy mother’s day to Mother Nature, the mother of mothers

[Mia @toomuchliving]

I captured the needle galaxy (NGC 4565) 🔭

[razzle @razzledaxel]

this is music for those who listen

[bab0oshka @bab0oshk44]

jasmine becket griffith

[☆꧁༒ @swtchbwabe]

playing tomadachii!! this is my real
job now.

[Nostos @NostosLit]

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sensible Thing

[Shivॐ @thehighmuse]

forests and trees do not absorb your negativity, they instead bathe you in a kind of love no human can match. they are so full of unconditional love that there is no place left for anything else. that fullness of source energy smothers every last bit of negativity in your being.

[Reign @hauntedreigns]

Fatal Frame (Playstation 2, 2001)

[☆꧁༒ @swtchbwabe]

i was then shot 57 times

[☆꧁༒ @swtchbwabe]

will i ever feel like i can fall in love… i feel like ive felt the edge but never truly there

[☆꧁༒ @swtchbwabe]

drinking now makes me wanna kms it’s no longer beautiful.

[☆꧁༒ @swtchbwabe]

@dukookim i love buc-ee’s until i get over stimulated….

[m̃ @hexesandspell]

I deserve a dragon after all I have been through

[seiya @systole_]

I want to live near the sea and I want to live near the forest and I want to live near the mountains and I want to live near a café and I want to live near a library and I want to live near a park and I want to live near a museum and I want to live

[☆꧁༒ @swtchbwabe]

happy earth day 🌎🌲🍃

[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.