Why Male Orcas Are Mummy's Boys
Вставка
- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- Orca mothers are truly amazing creatures and provide exceptional care for their offspring, especially if they are male. The care for sons continues for her whole life, exacting a great cost to her. This video looks at the ways in which Orca mums look after their sons and the possible reasons as to why sons get preferential treatment over her daughters.
Sources:
news-archive.e...
phys.org/news/...
www.bbc.co.uk/...
www.cell.com/c...
www.sciencedir...
www.science.or...
Aww, that's so cute! I love the orcas. And Ben is handsome, too. ☺
HAHA! I should have expected a picture of Ben in here. Oli still remains illusive.
Yep, he does not want his face seen on UA-cam 😂
This is so sweet! I hope everyone gets to have a parent like these mother orcas in their life
I so agree with you on that! 😄
There is pretty much always an evolutionary (net beneficial) reason for behaviours that appear harmful, if there wasn't -those individuals/species would have died off.
Orcas are a rather successful species, even despite human efforts/activity -the thought of meddling with their sex balance without even understanding why it is the way it is; is quite a scary one TBH.
If we want to halp; we should probably just leave their food source (wild salmon) alone.
I completely agree with you - if you save the Salmon, you save the Orca!
Very interesting....I was going to mention that i could see parallels with our own species..in aspects of some societies, if not universal....But, as usual, you had it well covered with your closing comments😁
As for the Orca mums, its obviously a behaviour that worked for generations..and would probably be still working...If they had enough food. I wonder if this behaviour will be altered , assuming these Orca can stay around for the next generations. Theres still so much to learn 🙂
Thank you. Yes, I wonder too if they can adapt, but I guess if there is not enough food for them, it just wont happen. It would be interesting to know if this behaviour occurs in all resident Orcas or just the Southern residents. I hope someone is studying that! 😀
@OneWorldNT Me too 🙂
And, I hope, given their intelligence..and half a chance..they will adapt a different behaviour..."You're grown now son...getta job!" 😁.
This resonates with me - I persevered with two sons and was then rewarded with a daughter ;->
They have widely different personalities and I love all of them dearly.
The southern residents may have to stop this practice if the salmon numbers continue to decline
Yeah, we've been seeing too many cases of starvation and malnutrition these last few years.
I wonder if they'll move to another food source, possibly resulting in them becoming transient whales? Transient seems more likely to me than becoming offshore whales, just due to the drastic difference in lifestyle, but you never know. I'm not well versed on fish species so I'm unsure if there's another fish population within their current range thay they can depend upon as a food source in addition to or in place of the salmon they currently eat.
Whatever happens, I hope they don't just slowly starve to death. That would be really tagic...
@@Mila-Rosa me too
Ironically and fittingly, Im watching this Video because your Son
suggested your Channel in one of his Videos, also a Video about Orcas
Yep, we planned it that way. Thank you for watching 😀
Would i be correct in supposing the lack of Chinnock salmon us from over fishing by humans?
Not to mention blockages of their spawning grounds up river by works by humans.
Yes it would be correct.
Studies say that from over-fishing alone, commercial fishing will not be viable by 2050.
Add warming, acidification and changes in salinity, currents and up welling because of stratification (warm layer on top prevent vertical water and nutrients movements from the bottom up).
There's also a decline in their food web since plankton is in decline. especially phytoplankton . the basis of the oceanic food web.
Houston, we have a dozen problems here. After all, planets are unguided spaceships.
I check on Science Daily once or twice a week. A nice clean website where most scientific research papers are summarized.
P.S. I support Sea Shepherd
@@a.randomjack6661 thx for the suggestion mate! Cheers!
Here's hoping America or California, Oregan & Washington create some protected areas off their shores.
Word to my motha imma get these fish and seals!
Ben doesn't want to show us Ollie. Will you do it?))
Hi, Oli doesn't want to be seen - I don't really know why, he is very handsome too - although I am obviously biased!
Sounds like bs to me but earlier documentary I've seen moms love their sons
You should give your kids a bit of stick. They want to continue working with Lee Berger much more than they want to be science communicators. Those three papers on Naledi were unpublishable hot garbage and the way the BenG channel represented the evidence was straight up deceptive and pretty low IQ at the same time.
Please be advised that you are not pronouncing chinook correctly. It is pronounced shə-ˈnu̇k
From Merriam-Webster -dictionary Chinook,
plural Chinook or Chinooks
1 : a member of an American Indian people of the north shore of the Columbia River at its mouth
2 : a Chinookan language of the Chinook and other nearby peoples
3 or less commonly chinook
a : a warm moist southwest wind of the coast from Oregon northward
b : a warm dry wind that descends the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains
4 or less commonly chinook : CHINOOK SALMON
5 : any of a rare breed of large, muscular dogs that were developed in New Hampshire in the early 1900s as sled and working dogs.
give me a break, "chanook" vs "chinook" sound similar enough + plus wiktionary lists her pronunciation as correct
@@mr.booboo1 I just checked Wiktionary and it agrees with me. Knowingly mispronouncing it is wrong. Defending a mispronunciation of a first nations people is racist.
@@Lord.Kiltridge take your meds
lovely and informative. i'm glad to have gotten the referral from one of Ben's videos.
Thank you!😀
What's dumb is liars create articles all the time facts it's what's about the truth don't believe the first thing you hear
there is a orca who lives here loves the toilet, right now hoovering in the bathroom
Females in several bird species seem to adjust their offspring sex ratio to favour more males when resources are plentiful and the nesting territory is secure. They tend to do the reverse in poor territories or when food is more scarce. The presumption is that female offspring are a safer bet in harsh times. Daughters carry the mother's genes forward while males are at a higher risk for higher reward. Males reproduce their maternal genes either not at all (by failing to gain territory and mates) or by having exponentially more offspring if they turn out to be successful breeders.
Species with live-birthed offspring such as mammals usually have larger male birth weights. This means the mother has invested more of her own physical resources in her sons from the outset compared to the average daughter. It's akin to going all-in on a *male* poker gamble. If such a mother is wrong, she loses everything. If her "Mummy's Boy" is successful then the mother gets a genetic jackpot. With daughters, a mother is already assured of a modest but fixed genetic return. Trying to pad the "daughter" bet is essentially meaningless because the mother gains very little *genetically* from doing more. Every daughter will return half of a half share of Mummy's genes in the next generation regardless. A son needs to be superior against mating competition to make his progeny (and his Mummy's quarter-shares in each one) exist at all. When an alpha male succeeds, his genes go into *more new bloodlines farther afield* and may survive beyond Mummy's home territory.
I wonder if there are other mammals that help out their sons more than their daughters? It will also be interesting to see if this behaviour is seen in other resident Orca populations or whether it is only in the Southern population.
Explain to us all what you mean by 'alpha male'
@@Deipnosophist_the_Gastronomer The dominant breeding male who might control a territory in his species so that he has the (assumed) parentage of the offspring of most - or indeed all - of the resident females.
The classic example would be the alpha male arctic wolf where the alpha pair are nominally the *only* ones to breed among the entire pack. Because food is so scarce, it takes the entire pack to assure the successful feeding of a single new litter during a hard winter. PBS ran an excellent documentary that showcased such a pack IIRC.
The silverback gorilla and his harem is a similar case. Elephant seal populations also seem to operate on such a basis with random cheating of course.
Pride lionesses who are all related sisters, mothers and aunts operate their reproduction with typically one or two *temporary* dominant males for as long as those males retain supremacy over any rivals for the hunting territory.
Most grazing herd species effectively have a modified loose version of this kind of reproductive politics but wild horses will have an alpha "lead stallion" driving them at the rear watching for rivals trying to poach females and a more literal lead mare running the herd's movements up front.
The subject of how these systems are cheated is also fascinating but this post is already far too long. Just research "precocious parr" in salmon. It's fascinating.
@@OneWorldNT As humans observing other species' antics we must be cautious lest we anthropomorphize what we observe. In an evolutionary lens POV, it may be nothing more than a case of a long-lived experienced mother having an innate sense of supporting the larger offspring which will favour advancing her genes. Many mammal mothers will reject a runt outright from any care at all.
To start with, the more demanding larger calf needing and getting more of mother's milk and therefore growing into a more successful offspring is a kind of self-propagating feedback loop in any species or population. Also, many male mammals tend to be born larger than females in a litter and you may see how this prejudice can be both innate and learned by an experienced intelligent orca mother.
Even in such single-calf breeding species the lesson is available to a mother who lives long enough and has sufficient cognition of comparative successes and failures within their family group. She may be only consciously favouring her bigger babies more and noticing that those tend to be males as a secondary matter. The direct benefit to her in "orca" society terms may be having a later-in-life in-house bodyguard once her reproductive years are over. We can only guess what her conscious thoughts might be.
Genetically, she will be rewarded if her son goes on to breed better as a bigger and stronger male. All her daughters are safe genetic bets that can't return any greater rewards than they already do.
Hyenas are a super interesting gender-reversed social mammal where their reproductive anatomy runs in opposition to this kind of thing yet it persists. Evolution is fascinating.
Whether it happens in other orca populations and to what degree may be down to our limited opportunity to observe such groups adequately. In an evolutionary sense, if it succeeds then it naturally will tend to happen by inference. We humans may or may not ever be around to record the activity in our journals.
@@puirYorick Thank you.
Now, in the context of orca matrilines, how exactly do male dominant breeding hierchies function?
A couple of points:
1) All whales are killers because even krill is a living creature or we should call the orcas "orcas" to avoid confusion
2) Unlike orca mother and son relationships, youtube mothers often are fed viewers from their sons, what are called in the field bens.
I don't like the term killer whales as technically Orcas are dolphins! Yes, its nice that Ben helps me out - his way of sharing his food with his matriarch 🤣
@@OneWorldNT:) :)