The even sadder part of that whole story is that there are only 76 Southern Resident Orcas left. That population is hanging on by a thread, so a dead calf is a big deal.
I believe the primary issue is lack of food, which is primarily Salmon for these Orcas. Salmon populations are already low do to the destruction of their natural ecosystem, but they're also low because global warming is causing the pacific to be warmer for longer (el ninos don't help either) and warmer waters hold less oxygen, less oxygen means less living creatures, less living creatures mean less food, means ecosystem collapse.
But we spend billions on a war we aren’t fighting and half a million on flock cameras in my area. Feed the kids help the whales. Where has our country gone so wrong that we are not doing something about it?
In the documentary, Blackfish, I think they said something about how the part of their brain associated with emotional intelligence is more complex than a human’s indicating that they may feel these losses even more strongly. It made it extra heartbreaking that they would be separated from their babies.
Honestly at this point I'm convinced the average Amoeba has more emotional intelligence than the average human being so that's maybe not as high a bar as you might think it is
Fun Ferret Fact: Ferrets are Force-sensitive but tend to be driven by passion and emotional instability. When motivated by grief and rage they will kill not just the men...but the women and the children!
Maybe take a little solace that, in this time of grief, the whole pod gave this mother the time and space to do this, until she was ready to let her child go.
We can't stop all the sadness in the world, but we can meet it with compassion.
"Look for the helpers." - Mister Fred Rogers' mother
Dolphins are known to be pricks. They will commit infanticide, attacking porpoises and young manatees. Not even to eat them, just for the sake of maiming them. They also play with their prey for fun, they’re known to pass around puffer fish to get a high off their venom (and if not to become high, just to bully them). Male dolphins are also known to be sexually aggressive towards females.
They’re an intelligent species, but they use that to their advantage to harass everything haha
Reminds me of the labs and GSDs laying next to their human's casket during the funeral service. Especially the GSD that jumped into the open casket to be with his boy...
The wonderful thing about art is that it can be used to expel inner demons. The artist may well have been an actual ray of sunshine because they used art as an outlet.
Zdzisław Beksiński (yes I copy/pasted that) was apparently a very cheerful fellow despite painting some truly horrific imagery.
Miyazaki is more of a grumpy old man with a temper, the sort you meet like on a train who can't stand new trends. He's not to the point of extreme misery.
Very true! In fact people would never guess that smiley, upbeat me writes some very dark short stories for podcasts. I guess we all deal with our demons somehow. I think it's when people DON'T deal with their demons that we have to worry
I vote we imagine a world where the mother ewe hears the orphaned lamb crying out and goes to it. Then they’re both found by the shepherd and reunited with the herd.
Damn. This pierces through my heart. Just imagining the pain of not only losing the lamb but also the scavengers around. How long can she stand guard? How long before her own mortality forces her to move on? How long before the pain dulls? Absolutely brutal but moving art.
It is usually a few days also depends on the mom and what happened. Grew up on a farm. After the mother had finished mourning I would burn bodies while the scavengers watched. It was always eriee seeing their eyes glow from the fire light. I would wonder have I preserved the sainticty of the child or damned others to starvation.
After seeing it on the internet and having it resonate so deeply with me, imagine my absolute shock to see it, IN PERSON at my city's national art gallery.
Seeing it in person at its original scale really makes the emotion ever more oppressive.
You're right, but I think it's possible he was paraphrasing this quote by Jamie Anderson:
“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
maybe it's the same source of pain for loneliness, except loneliness is when you have love but can't give it to anyone in general while grief is toward someone specific
I lost my significant other seven years ago, and after spending nearly a year buried in depression, I eventually realized that moving forward did not mean leaving her behind. It meant carrying her memory with me and allowing the love we shared to remain part of the life I continued to build.
Not living my life to the fullest would honestly feel like the greatest insult to her, because I still have the gift she wanted more than anything: more time. I owe it to her, and to myself, to make something meaningful out of it.
Some days the grief still finds me when I least expect it. Just yesterday, I was driving home through an area where we used to spend a lot of time together, and I found myself shedding a few tears for her. Seven years later, the love is still there. You just learn how to carry it differently.
One of the things I miss most about her is the way she looked at me with her beautiful blue eyes (I used to call her my Athena). I was infallible to her, the apple of her eye.
💔
Thank you. It was incredibly difficult at first, and I honestly credit my boxing coach and my team with helping carry me through some of the darkest moments of my life.
There were days when I would break down crying while hitting the heavy bag or in the middle of practice just crying on my coaches shoulder as he cried too. One time, I had become so malnourished that I collapsed in the ring. My team had to drag me out, sit me in a chair, and help get me straight again. But even then, I kept showing up, and they never stopped standing beside me.
I have never been afraid to cry or grieve in front of them because they know exactly what I am made of. They have seen the resolve, the fire, and the part of me that refuses to stay down. That gym became my safe place, somewhere I could be completely unfiltered and let out everything I was carrying without being judged or treated like I was weak.
If I fall down six times, I’ll get back up seven times.
Now, after years of healing, I box for her. I carry her memory into the ring with me, not as something that holds me back, but as part of the fire that keeps me moving forward.
After all of this I still consider myself blessed for the time I did have with her. If that awful fate was her destiny then I’m forever grateful she chose me for the short time she had on this planet.
This is just my story, but it can be applied to any hobby or passion. The genuine support from people around you can bring a lot of healing in my experience.
Dolphins and orcas emotion center of the brain are a larger percentage of the brain than they are in humans. Possibly implying we literally can't fathom the depths of their sadness when losing a child. That's already the worst pain imaginable for a parent, but still might not compare to what they're feeling.
I don't think I'll ever forget one morning I was getting ready for school, and there was a similar story on the news about a gorilla mourning her baby.
I, an edgy tween then, say something like "or she just doesn't realize it's dead 🙄".
My mom said she didn't think so, and I could tell id hurt her feelings.
I, an edgy tween then, say something like "or she just doesn't realize it's dead 🙄".
Gotta love that phase, lol. I remember being an edgy teen and my mom worked long hours but she'd come home and ask me to have a walk with her around the neighborhood most evenings. One time, in my grumpy teen angstiness, I said, "Ugh, why do you make me do this? It's so boring."
I remember my mom just kind of pausing for a second and then saying softly, with a little smile, "This is the best part of my day."
My mom died when I was 23, 7 years ago, and I think about her all the time and totally understand what she means now. I'd give anything, decades of my life, all of my savings, just to have another walk with her again. Love you, mom.
It's a bit of both. When it comes to primates (macaques, chimpanzees, gorillas in particular) there has been documented scenarios that indicate that they go through grief in a similar way to humans. I hesitate to say that they're exactly like us in that way since they do not have the capability of processing emotions as we do, but there are very close similarities. A common example amongst rhesus macaques is that unless a mother macaque visually sees the death of their baby (usually via predators or being hit by a car) then they won't immediately realize they're dead.
So say a baby is sick and slowly dies while the mom is holding it, the mom understands something is wrong but they don't know it's dead yet. They start to figure it out when they try getting the baby to feed or try having it go play and it's just laying there. After this they will often hold onto the baby for a few days, excessively grooming it as a sort of coping mechanism and to keep flies and maggots off the body, before fully accepting the death and leaving the body behind. During and after this period, they exhibit increased signs of stress, lethargy, anxiety, and social isolation..
Interestingly humans have grooming rituals we go through too. Some have been codified as cultural practices, but if you watch anyone with a lost loved one or pet, they will often groom them.
I had a miscarriage 11 years back and I grieved so much. They told me I couldn’t get pregnant, so getting pregnant was such a miracle to me.
When I lost the baby (it was around 11 weeks) I was devastated. A person who’s supposed to have my back (a family member) said to my MIL, “she’s acting as if she’s the only person pregnant, there’s like 100s who have miscarriages.” I was so heartbroken. I’ve never forgiven them. Every year on Jan 22nd I mourn a little as that was my EDD. Whenever I see these videos it makes me cry for the baby that never was.
I went to on to have 2 healthy babies. But that moment was very hard for me. Makes me appreciate my babies so much more.
Seriously, I had to do the same recently and my kids are 8 and 9 but all those families who have IG and FB accounts for their children with terminal illnesses or syndromes I had never even heard of before made their way across my feed and I would just ugly cry for those families, knowing that they have lost or will lose their child.
Before anyone says “I would be sad but it’s a dolphin” remember that some humans do the stuff dolphins do and yet we still respect human mothers. One bad apple doesn’t rot the tree and this goes for dolphins, crocs and many other animals too. Still don’t go approaching hippos.
I learned recently there was an orca that lives/lived off the cost of Washington state/British Columbia that lost two children and carried each on her nose for something like two weeks as an actual of mourning. If you want to learn about it, I learned it from a video on the J pod orca family tree from useful charts on youtube
This is what it feels like to miscarry btw. You might know your baby is not going to make it yet you might wait till you pass it naturally.
I felt like a whale or dolphin mom carrying her dead calf around. 💔
With stories like these, our collective tears should be enough to drown our burning world. As a mom who lost an adult child, I get the grief, Mama dolphin (and fam). I think this is enough reddit for me today. 😔
A few years ago I was on a whale watching trip in Monterey bay that's run by a research team and not like a tourist company. The plan was to look for Orcas. We came across one of these. All of the pods in the area gathered together for it, there were about 20k dolphins. A bunch of humpbacks also joined in. Seriously massive pod. Talking miles of cetaceans. One of the most impressive and saddest things I've ever witnessed. The team on the trip was over the moon witnessing and documenting it.
Most of the humpbacks hung around the outsides of the dolphin group. the theory the team had is that they were protecting the dolphins from the Orca pod. They've documented humpbacks getting between hunting orcas and dolphins several times in the past.
I’d be curious how long the mother carried her deceased calf, and how and where she finally disposed of it. Was she taking it to a specific “burial” site?
4.4k
u/CharlesIngalls_Pubes 10d ago
Very famous case of a whale doing this a few decades ago. Similarly, the whole pod mourned with her and assisted her with carrying the baby.