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Comment by tjr225 | Hacker News Reader

Kind of ironic that the author used a whale watching tour to observe the Orcas. These tours are disruptive to resident Orca populations(non-transient).

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   Who cares about nature, spends a week camping / hiking.  Nature is awesome!

It’s easier to get people to care if they have some level of hands on involvement.

Wife has taught kids that have never seen an ocean. Despite living a mile from the ocean. To those kids it was a concept, not meaningful.

I wrote a blog post [1] partly about why the answer to this is not whale watching.

[1] https://medium.com/@pc.peterso/why-seaworld-must-be-saved-75...

What’s the tjr225 compliant way of observing Orcas?

We don't yet have the technology. But where there is a will there is a way. If we could derive ad money from Orca observation, I'm sure our bright minds will come up with something this decade. Or OAAS.

I'm actually working on a side project called Whalebernetes which will allow you to orchestrate groups of virtual Orcas to perform tasks like gather salmon or seals. These Orca groups, or Pods can then be moved between various Oceans as-needed depending on the needs of your business.

That sounds promising. Watch out, you'll also need some way to get those pods to stay where you need them, like to dock them with a harbour.

I imagine one day, if your idea really takes off, we could abstract away our fisheries activities almost entirely (for most businesses), simply doing our fishing in "The Foam". (The Foam is really just other people's water)

Maybe someday they could be viewed from an innocuous object with cameras installed. Like the remote controlled elephant dung pile cam:

https://youtu.be/LCqaFvc7rDw

There is long range infra-red: https://www.mmo-association.org/infrared

I'm involved in setting something up like this in Australian waters.

The post was noting the irony of the article- not my personal ethics. But sure if it makes you that self conscious I’ll go there: there really isn’t one aside from getting lucky from the shore or some sort of sustainable fishing vessel.

The GP was just poking fun. Getting defensive and suddenly asserting a bold, moral stance without evidence, seems a bit thin-skinned to me.

FWIW, I read this paper which says that whale-watching is not unethical provided certain protocols are observed.

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jmb/2012/807294/

I don’t really care what the GP was doing. Tourists come to the puget sound and fuel an economy of boats that swarm an ostensibly endangered group of local whales. Why would I care what a person who thinks that is funny thinks?

There are seventy five resident orcas in the puget sound. Seventy five. Their lives are disrupted by 100 years of industrialization and we’ll be lucky if they’re here in 2121.

For what it’s worth I went on a whale watching tour a few years ago. I regret it.

There are several marine parks that have dolphins and/or orcas. It's probably better from the orcas' utilitarian perspective to go there where it's contained than to add on demand to the intrusions on the wild populations.

Are whale watching tours more disruptive to orcas then other regular boat traffic? The tours in California are required to stay a safe distance from marine mammals.

Some of the larger whale boats in my area (CA) are very loud, and I can hear their droning miles away when I'm kayaking - there's dozens of these boats. They cooperate with each other to find the whales, so I assume it's a constant pestering presence. I think it might be more reasonable if they were restricted to weekends only.

It was eerily peaceful out on the water for the several months the whale boats were shut down due to covid.

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