Tag Archives: climate-change

Benevolent Orca Pods Are Adopting Baby Pilot Whales in an Apparent Effort to Clean Up the Species’ Image

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Researchers have noticed a strangely sweet behavior among Icelandic orcas: the adoption of a baby whale from an entirely different species. 

As so-called "killer whales" have made news over the past few years for violent boat attacks in European waters, marine biologists have noticed a far sweeter behavior in Iceland's frigid waves: the adoption of a baby whale from an entirely different species.

In interviews with Scientific American, scientists described their shock at observing a pilot whale calf that traveled with an Icelandic pod of orcas over a period of years.

One of those researchers, Chérine Baumgartner, said she and her colleagues at the Icelandic Orca Project initially couldn't believe their eyes.

"At first, we were like, 'Oh my god, this killer whale calf has a problem,'" the researcher said of the bulbous-headed baby she and her team first spotted back in 2022. It looked at first glance like a malformed orca — until they realized it was no killer whale at all.

The next day, when Baumgartner and her colleagues were witnessing the same pod again, the baby pilot whale was absent. Eventually, however, they started seeing baby pilot whales with orca pods throughout 2022 and 2023, and began to develop theories about what was happening.

In a new paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, Baumgartner and her team from a consortium of Nordic research institutions have posited three theories about the fascinating matchup: that the orcas are hunting the babies, playing with them, or perhaps even nurturing them.

As SciAm notes, each sighting involved a pilot whale calf that could be no more than a few weeks old that swam alongside an adult orca female in what marine biologists call "echelon position," with the baby beside and slightly behind the elder.

In some instances, the baby pilot whale was nudged along by the adult orcas, and on another occasion, it swam ahead of the pod before the adults caught up to it and lifted it out of the water and onto one of their backs.

That kind of playful and protective behavior does not, of course, sound predatory — but because "killer whales" are known for their violence, it can't be completely ruled out, the scientists say.

Along with what the orcas are doing with the baby pilot whales, researchers want to know how the two species, which generally do not overlap, came to not only be in the same place but also coexist in such a way.

"It could be," Baumgartner told SciAm, "[that the orcas] encountered the pilot whale opportunistically, and some individuals played with the whale, and others tried to nurture it."

As study co-author Filipa Samarra noted, there's a chance that climate change has led pilot whales, which typically follow schools of warm water-seeking mackerel, into orca territory.

More on marine life: Scientists Take First Ever Video of Colossal Squid in the Wild... With One Comical Issue

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Benevolent Orca Pods Are Adopting Baby Pilot Whales in an Apparent Effort to Clean Up the Species' Image

Mexico Is Getting So Hot That Even Young People Are Dropping Dead

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Scientists have found that not just older adults are succumbing to dangerous temperatures driven by climate change.

Killer Heat

Scientists have found that it's not just older adults succumbing to dangerous temperatures driven by climate change — even younger people may be more susceptible to extreme heat as well.

As detailed in a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers found that three-fourths of heat-related deaths in Mexico between 1998 and 2019 were people under the age of 35.

It's a fascinating — and perhaps foreboding — new finding that suggests it's not just the elderly who are at the highest risk of dying from heat.

"These age groups are also quite vulnerable to heat in ways that we don’t expect even at temperatures that we don’t think of as particularly warm," first author and Stanford University environmental social scientist Andrew Wilson told the New York Times.

Wet Bulb Blues

Since getting an accurate picture of how many people die due to heat exhaustion is difficult — death certificates often don't list heat as a cause — the team turned to data relating to changes in "wet bulb" temperatures, which take both humidity and air temperatures into account to gauge how well human bodies can adapt to heat.

"While multiple metrics exist to measure humid heat stress, wet-bulb temperature has been identified as an important metric for understanding the impact of heat on human health because it accounts for the critical role of sweat evaporation — the primary mechanism by which the human body cools itself — in maintaining homeostasis under heat exposure," the paper reads.

Around a wet bulb temperature of just 95 degrees Fahrenheit, "humans can no longer dissipate heat into the environment and are thus physically incapable of survival when exposed for a sufficient length of time," the researchers wrote.

Surprisingly, the researchers found that even at much lower wet bulb temperatures of around 75 degrees Fahrenheit — or 88 degrees Fahrenheit with 50 percent humidity — adults between the ages of 18 to 34 were dying from heat.

That's in contrast to adults older than 70 being vulnerable to much higher wet bulb temperatures.

It's a concerning finding, considering the number of extreme heat waves is only expected to rise as climate change continues to push up temperatures around the globe. The team projects that the number of deaths among young adults will increase by 32 percent by the year 2100.

"You’re going to increase the number of moderately warm days much more than you’re going to increase the number of extremely hot days," Wilson told the NYT.

Worse yet, those between the ages of 18 to 34 are also far more likely to engage in strenuous activities outdoors, including sports or work-related tasks, leaving them more at risk.

"It’s not just about your physiological vulnerability," coauthor and Columbia University graduate student Daniel Bressler told the newspaper. "It’s about the economic and the social factors that make it so that you’re more exposed."

More on death heat: Dozens of Americans Die in Brutal Heat Wave

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Mexico Is Getting So Hot That Even Young People Are Dropping Dead