Orca Brains and Intelligence - Dr. Lori Marino at Whale Museum, Friday Harbor

you could be here the whale museum offers this is a public lecture series no charge to the public we want to have the opportunity for visiting researchers and educators artists and authors who come through to have an opportunity to talk about their work and interact with you so let's get right to it are you ready it is at this point standing room only unless you collapse and then it's lighting room only there are a couple of spots here in the floor if you feel like doing some yoga you're welcome to come up front but we've run out of chairs so thanks for that Laurie but we're really excited to have Laurie here some of you have probably been to the talks about the whale sanctuary project Laurie Moreno is the founder and president of the whale sanctuary talk but before that she's a marine mammal neuroscientist I was with Emory University for over 20 years so she studied the Orca brain and intelligence a lot and she offered that while she was here this week to do the stock to have an opportunity to interact with you about work intelligence so while she's happy to answer questions about the whale sanctuary of project let's let her get through her presentation first and if there is still time at the end after she's finished with her presentation we can go to that but that is not the purpose of tonight's topic she's done a variety of meetings around the islands to do that so focus for tonight is orc intelligence and then in the Q&A I feel like you'd be happy to take additional questions about that too and I usually don't take questions from the audience Caroline but go ahead she's okay with photographs and she's okay with recording so Heather's upfront recording but if you wanted to do any video in whatever she's okay with that often our presentation presentations are with scientists that are doing unpublished data and they asked us not to record she's not like that so please join me in welcoming Laura well thank you very much [Laughter] it is incredibly hot up here with this and this is this I'll try not to sweat too much so I really want to thank you for coming and allowing me to share what I know from 30 years of research on cetacean brains in particular oracle brains and intelligence so today we're going to ask a few questions who are orchids and where did they come from from an evolutionary standpoint of all what of their modern brains like and a little bit at the end about their welfare and I hope that you will make the connection between what who they are and and their welfare under certain circumstances so let's get started who are orphans and where do they come from Wow let's go back 50 to 55 million years okay and let's focus in on this area here the tempest sea because that is the cradle that is the birthplace of all dolphins and whales the tennis see that's where they all began and we actually know who the land animal was that gave birth to the aquatic dolphins and whales you're ready [Music] ugly did somebody say okay this guy is pakicetus and his genus that with around 50 to 55 million years ago is called pakicetus because they originated near Pakistan a Pakistan on the Tennessee and this is the earliest whale now I'm to look at him and say why would you ever think he's a whale well we know is because he has certain morphological characteristics skeletal characteristics that put him right in line with the earliest whales so we know this is the earliest whale I learned point out a few interesting features about this guy um first of all if you look at his feet you will not find claws you will find hooks the reason is is because dolphins and whales are closely related to food animals ungulates and that is their closest relative actually hippopotamus are the closest relative but those are quotes on the end of his feet and take a look at this part he has a nose where you'd expect a nose to me and whiskers right and that is going to change over the course of the evolution of dolphins and whales and I have to point out small brain now that consuming he was especially dense what is small relative to what that brain is going to become now just in case you're feeling kind of heady and you think oh my gosh guess what our ancestors look like around the same time about 15 million years ago prosimians were just getting started in the trees and there were really no monkeys no Apes obviously no human is but our ancestors look like your eyes [Music] okay let's let's look at the story of how we get from this die 50 55 million years ago to in warth us for any modern citation here's the story that we know from fossil evidence so this guy was all terrestrial right and at some point he made a transition and this is the first transitional form of cetaceans this is ambulocetus walking whale because this guy live both on land and in the water and you see it kind of looks a little bit more streamlined but he's still got you know or four limbs and his it's a face looks very much like pakicetus these early forms were called archaea seeds ancient whales here's the next one up this one is more recent 35 to 40 million years ago this is dragged on and you can notice that this one is more cetacean like right its back legs are receiving getting more tail flukes pecks just starting to look more whale like and these are cue seeds continued on for a long time fully aquatic know at the location small brain and then something happens isn't that scientific [Music] we actually kind of know a little bit about what happened it's trying to be dramatic there but I'm pretty lying here because all of these guys are Casillas went extinct they won't let extinct obviously not all of them but most of them and about 30 to 35 million years ago we have the beginning of early modern cetaceans now nobody around now but the beginnings of those lineages here's an example this is squalid on who lived about 20 to 25 million years ago this this guy was fully aquatic you could see he's got a lot of the features of modern dolphins and whales so for the next couple of slides I'm gonna focus in on the vents something happens that was kind of neat so as I mentioned around 30 to 35 million years ago something happened well what happened is that there was a critical shift in the oceans where these guys resided there was temperature shift there was a turnover prey and the Archaea seats primarily died off a few of them evolved very quickly into something very different but that evolution placed them on a path to being one of the most complex mammals on the planet what happened we went from this guys in archaea sea to modern dolphins and whales and here's the thing this guy you would not want to be in the water with right look at his death he's huge he's that formidable teeth the teeth of a predator he's still in a small brain and he's not at the locating and to that shift you get really yeah you get orcas and dolphins with much larger brains smaller teeth and a completely different social ecology so that shift with the ship that made the difference for dolphins and whales let's look at some of the things that happen during that time well the cranium the skull changed went from being an animal with a notes in the at the ends to an animal with the nostrils migrated up to the top of the head away all dolphins and whales have their nostrils on top of their head now the teeth went from being carnivorous teeth of all different kinds chopping biting crunching whatever to little peg like teeth okay then that's a big difference in terms of how you hunt how you eat and the inner ear for the older ones could not support high-frequency sounds so we know if our qc3 nada Ethel okay the newer early forms were on their way to EPEL okay ting because the ear bones that are preserved showed that they could process high frequency sound today we've got tremendous diversity in modern cetaceans right we've got two different sub orders of Donna seats and mysticetes and we've got six different families of odontocetes there's the beluga whale the river dolphins sperm whales porpoises and this is the largest family itself in a day and that's the family that orchids belong to an orcas with sinus Orca are actually large dolphins so let's take a look at what happened to their brains during that shift because I have to say the evolution of dolphins and whales is one of the most spectacular evolutionary stories right not only did they change their way of life completely their brains completely changed let's take a look so let's go back to what we know that the evolutionary transformation that we're talking about with from being a large formidable predator with big teeth and a small brain and know at the location to being smaller a having smaller teeth a big brain and the beginnings of echolocation so that shift change their social ecology to one that started them on the road to being the complex social beings they are today how do we know this we've noticed because I spent a lot of time at the Smithsonian Museum and what I was doing there with my colleagues is taking the skulls of fossilized dolphins and whales from his bath bar Bacchus take forty five fifty million years ago getting them out of the drawers putting them in a CT scanner I'll explain that a little while and figuring out the shape and the size of the inside of their skull which matches the shape and size of being up there Brandt was the brains gone but we can get a sense of the brain from the inside of the skull what did we learn in this process and then I'll say how we did it well if you just look at this right this is millions of years ago so this is like 50 million years ago all the way up to the present and on this axis is something called EQ now for our purposes all you need to know is EQ is a measure of how big the brain is compared with the body okay so it's a measure of how encephalitis ringing how how much the brain has elaborated in that body and as you go from left to right you go from smaller to bigger now let's take a look at what happened here are those armies seats with the big teeth and the small brain they were all around until about 35 million years ago small brain big body then here's that shift that I was talking about and after that point all of the early forms that were to become our modern dolphins and whales had an especially large brain this was a significant increase in brainy mr. encephalization that occurred his jump from here to here so brain brainiacs were replacing the RTC's and you can see these are all fossil extinct dolphins and whales and you can see they're all veering towards the right which means that they're all getting bigger and bigger brains and these are all the modern forms and you can see they're all sort of towards the right here's the Delphinus and the the orcas are in in here so we know from the cranium fossil that there was this dip from small brain to big brain and the brains became not only larger but they also be more complex they changed in shape so here's the brave anarchist see just drawing from fossil 37 million years ago what this is is a reconstruction from a CT scan of a twenty seven million year old dolphin o0r opus and this one is a more modern extinct dolphin for forty years ago and this is the brain of a modern Orca so what do you notice well you know that's a lot of things right the lobes the lobe so here's the cerebrum and you can see how the cerebrum it's just completely taking over the brain they are literally becoming more cerebral some other stuff you know what these are these are all factory bulbs they end at the nose the arcus seat Adam these guys had them but by around this time no more and that's why modern dolphins and whales can smell they don't have olfactory bulbs anymore so we went from this to this in about 40 50 million years now let me tell you a little bit about how we did this technology wise because it's cool right so um here is the skull of an artist II an ancient whale small brain one in a CT scanner at the Smithsonian Institution right we put this guy through the scanner when you get you get slices that like this where's the brain well no brain but here's the cranial cavity won't fill them so what we can do is we can go slice by slice by slice by slice trace around there get areas and then finally get a volume for the whole brain from beginning to end front to back we can also do cool things like reconstruct the whole brain by putting all the slices together and we get something that looks like this now this is a different animal illness but this is a 3d reconstruction from a fossil dolphin and it's just consists of hundreds of very very thin digital slices through the brain here's the back of the brain here's the front so that's how we do it and that's how we figure out what the brains of fossil dolphins so told you a little bit about how we got to modern brains let me tell you now about what those modern brains are like and what we talked a little bit about what those brains tell us about the psychology of dolphins and whales and orcas so what can we learn about Orca psychology from their brain quite a bit actually quite a bit so let's go inside the Orca brain here it is hey it's already impressive looking right and you're already thinking if you have an affair we already complex thinking oh my god are we in well honey yeah let me tell you a little bit about this brain and then we're going to unpack each of these first of all all this Bryant obviously is a very large brain but it's a large animal but this brain weighs about 15 pounds is the size of a very very large basketball compared to average it's about 3 pounds now I will tell you about how we know that this brain is oversized even for that large body and that's very important for intelligence we will also talk about the fact that this frame is more cerebral than the human brain and I will explain what that means I'm also going to talk about how this brain is fancier than ours and I'm going to talk about the parts of this brain that are really elaborated and areas that do some really interesting stuff so again here's the Orca brain this is the front this is the back here's a bottlenose dolphin bringing front back it's a human brain front back not to scale but you can already see some differences between the two cetacean brains and the human brain just in terms of overall shape the trajectory of that brain over evolutionary time also you can see differences the surface right you can see that this gray is a lot more convoluted than the spring this one is to that tells you something as well talk about packing here's a cerebellum ours is under here but if you look at all these brains you know that these are intelligent animals because their brain has elaborated so much from that small low sloping bring small cerebra that we had and back 50 million years ago so how large are their brains compared with Alice we like to feel that you know I'm now brains are so large for a body and that's why ever so smart so let's take a look at this this is work that I did many years ago and what I wanted to know was ok compared with primates who we know abrini what about modern toothed whales of Donna sees how brainy they compared with the primates right so I did I measured a bunch of brains of hundreds of modern dolphins and whales wave them wave the bodies or something that told me about body size and again got a measure called EQ all you have to know is that if you have an EQ of one your average in other words you're an average mammal your brains about as big as you'd expect for a mammal of your bond size that would be like a pack as you go up your brain gets bigger compared with your body size so for instance an EQ of five means your brain is five times bigger than you'd expect for your body size so what you're looking at here are as different dolphin species and great ape species white-sided dolphin orangutan modern you gorilla common dolphin chimpanzee rock tooth dolphin organs just some measures and what you see is yeah okay we have a brain seven times the size of expect yeah we're bringing and take a look at our closest relatives here I mean they patty cues in the two point 5 to point 7 brains to bringing to the table look at some of these dolphin species whoa they far exceed great apes much closer to humans and some of them have brains three four five times the size you would expect even for a large animal the white-sided dolphin for instance the rough toothed dolphin five and here the orcas at close to three about 2.75 so they're right in there and so the take-home message for this is that primates are not the only bring you guys on the fly there are a lot of dolphins out there swimming around with giant brains bigger bigger than chimpanzees and orangutans and release okay let's take a look at something that I mentioned before cool how serene the brain is remember I mentioned that the brain of dolphins whales pretty cerebral but what do we mean by that well if you look at the surface area of the human brain look at the surface area that dolphin brain and you look at the size of the hemispheres compared with the inside of the brain right that means that those hemispheres all that gray matter wrinkled gray matter has really elaborated in the human right and that's true for primate right so isn't inside of the brain can't even see because our cerebral hemispheres are just so overblown and that's called cerebral ization portable ization what it means is that we've got a lot of gray matter that does a lot of high abstract thinking well take a look at the dolphin brain hair which just like the Orca brain it turns out that if you measure this part of the brain is cerebrum the gray matter the really rainy part compared with the rest of the brain that does more like bodily functions that this cerebrum accounts for a higher percentage of the total brain volume in orchids than in humans right so think about that so got a whole brain volume right and that grape does a lot of things that does everything from regulate breathin which is not the most cerebral thing in the world to appetite to temperature and then it also does things like calculus philosophy art and since people remove and it turns out that if you just look at the frame that part of the brain that if you were to guess which of these without knowing anything else about them sent people to move this because this framing is more cerebral than that brain there's more gray matter for total volume in the Orca brain than in the now what that means right now that tell you about something we discovered about four or five years ago and I could tell you a little bit about how we did it and my colleagues and I are team we love using imaging techniques magnetic resonance imaging computer technology and this is this fancy magnetic resonance imaging called diffusion tensor imaging because you could put a whole giant brain in the scanner and you can look at the inside and keep the brain intact and you can look at things like different structures how big of a which shape are they and you can also look at where one part of the brain connects with another and that's what you do with this fancy schmancy I'm on you put a brain in an mr i-- scanner how many of powering it MRI so right so you kind of know you go in there and we can do this with post-mortem brains scan it but because this is a special kind magnetic resonance imaging it allows you not to see so much tissue as tracks if this happens to be a human brain and this happens to be the wiring of the human brain related to language so the different colors represent the different orientations of the tracks but these are this is the the circuit of connectivity in the human brain that has been identified as the serpent needed for us to do language so that's just to give you an idea of what diffusion tensor imaging does it allows you to track trace to trace tracks so let's see what happens when we put a dolphin and whale brain in the scanner well the story is this this was shocking shocking surprising because somebody else had said maybe we can find this we know that dolphins and whales echolocate and they're very sophisticated in terms of acoustics right and we known for a long time that there's an area on the top of their brain that was identified as a primary auditory region what does that mean that's a fancy way of saying that if you go from the ear up to the brain you can trace a track from the inner ear all the way up to that part that's the first stop of sound information in we'll bring now so we've got that and we've had that for a long time that's because of some studies done in Russia where they don't have animal welfare regulations but we know it okay so until 2015 that's all they knew about how dolphins and whales including orcas process sound here's a human brain we have one auditory track as you know we can trace it from the inner ear all the way up to every there listen anything but this is the start of the brain so we start we can find out that if we start at the inner ear like the ear drum there's a continuous track all the way up to the side of our brain pull the temporal lobe and that's the first stop over and then if there's all kinds of things like get mixed with visual information do languages so that circuit there and all times but that's it that's what we've got now we know that dolphins and whales have - now why is that surprising because we're not talking about you know part of the dolphin brain that is like ours and then it gets integrated with other parts of the brain we're talking about two separate tracks okay it's like having two auditory nerves and they go to complete different places in the brain this one is the one we discovered and it goes to the temporal lobe just like our auditory tract this is the one we already knew about and that's the one that's near the visual system so what do you think that's involved with at the location but this one might be involved with other things like some kind of linguistic processing of the kinds of sounds not at the locating sounds and these two talk to each other after they get integrated with all kinds of things in their brain so this is we knew that dolphins and whales were fancy in terms of acoustics we had no idea that we're talking about this fancy let's take a look at some parts of the brain that I really find impressive how many of you have seen blackfish a lot of you so in that movie I was asked to talk about particular parts of the author brain and so these are things of my my favorite parts of the Orca brain and I'll explain why so this is a human brain it's a cross section top bottom it is an MRI scan just look at this little crease here this will freeze it's called a single itself this and whenever there's a crease in the brain you know that it's doing something important because it increases the surface area of the brain it's the brains way of packing a lot of tissue into the cranium I mean if which with ala brain and hold a gray matter that you can see there and it's a sheep and it's folded if we were to expand it on it from wall to wall but obviously we don't have heads that big so evolution has figured out that the way to do that is to go crunch it off and that's why we have such wrinkles brains and that's where dolphins and whales and monkeys and other animals have wrinkles right so here we have this little crease the cingulate self if that's an interesting part of the brain and we'll mammals it does things like awareness does things like social cognition things of that nature man take a look at the Orca brain it's a slice through the same part of the Orca brain top bottom here's that same softest okay you see the difference and take a look above this sulfus do you see anything you just you'd see another wrinkle right well go to the Orca brain here's a cingulate selfish and what do you got here hey that's a whole other loan it's called the para limbic lobe meaning the lobe that connects the emotional systems to the abstract thinking and it is unique participation we don't have it so what is the paralympic low do again it's links and pollution it links memory and it links learning and we know this because all mammals have the same brain functions in the we're making an assumption maybe this is doing something like free breathing but I really doubt it okay if this brain is a mammal brain and it is then this part of the brain is extraordinarily highly elaborated and what this part of the brain does is connect the limbic system the emotions with the problem-solving abstract part of the brain that tells you something about the Orca brain and how they here's another favorite the insula here's the human brain again and here's our insula outline injury okay priest okay that part of the brain does self-awareness social emotions and some motor control so take a look at that come over here to New York the brain take a look at the Orca insula okay it is just what I call a riot of tissue so that tells you that this brain is doing something very special with the insula in support X and if the insult cortex is doing anything like any of these things which it does in all mammal brains tells you something about the psychology of workers and other dolphins so putting this all together we all know about the southern residents we all know about the dolphins and whales who live in the oceans and we observe them but by understanding something about the brain it ground truths it gives you insight into who they are and what they're thinking and their psychology and the depth of their thoughts we know that their cultural needs we know that they collaborate and cooperate together they form complex alliances lifelong social bonds many of species are matrilineal and subspecies of matrilineal they even have menopause they have very complex social networks and that is not surprising when you look at the part of the brain that I just showed you and of course very sophisticated communication abilities which is not surprising either considering what I just showed you about the brain so the brain allows you to infer that what you think about their psychology could absolutely be the case I just one end with some implications for Oracle welfare because I do a lot of work on the well-being of orcas and other views and concrete tanks and performance parts now you know something about cow dolphin and whale brains began from humble beginnings elaborated completely changed about 30 to 35 million years ago became really brainy and in fact in ways that even exceed the human brain take that ring and put that brain here this is kissed up she lives in Marineland Canada she's all alone she's seen five of her children dying in tanks she has nothing in her brain in her in her tank not even a hoop for a ball so think about that brain right here and this empty tank and what it must be like we know now you know that that brain experiences tremendous stress and the concrete tanks we know that they are mentally disturbed we know that they show all kinds of mental disturbances things like stereo diffuse repetitive self-harm here's just an example here is Kiska again these are party well what's left of them okay she's ground them down over the course of the years on hard concrete so that they're numb and they have to be drilled out you can see the holes in them and watch that every single day so that's what most orchids doing concrete tanks and that is because of having a brain and I just showed these repetitive abnormal behaviors called stereo de pees lead to systemic illness pneumonia satellite is faster pulses they're well medicated on anti-anxiety medications causes ulcers and their life in the taxes pre sure their lifespan in concrete tanks it's about less than half of what you see in one in a healthy population how many of you remember granny she was close to a hundred if not a hundred or a little over right now she was pretty exceptional but in wild the southern residents and northern residents and so forth they lived 50 60 70 80 90 years in the tanks their life expectancy does not exceed 15 to 20 years and these are the ones born in the right and what that tells you is that that brain is a wild brain it's a complex brain a brain adapted to living in the ocean challenged by ocean free ranging life and doesn't belong in an entertainer so I want to thank you for listening to me thank the whale museum for inviting me you can email me there or check out some of the stuff we're doing and I just like to turn it over to questions now [Applause] let's start at the beginning what's the size of the pack TV Cephas the papacy this is about the size of a medium-sized dog got fur but her Ruth with that fur Byford um probably the in question was that he plants probably but at some point went back into the water and ate whatever was in there now why we have no idea yeah and grew in size significantly the next creature you the one who's really big teeth yeah that was a big car guy right so when they went back into the water if the ambulocetus the walking whale dura Donnell those are key seafood shine they were used they had tip spines and tails that went out forever some of them at the length of this room big carnivore teeth okay very different animal five million up five million year difference which is relatively short relatively short but they kind of stayed that way until about 30 35 million years ago and then when that shift in temperature in the ocean change they couldn't handle it so most of them went extinct a few of them rose to the occasion and between early models how does the elephant brings oh that's a great question elephant brain so an elephant's brain is it's large compared with their body but its appearance it's kind of a different brain it's more of an ungulate brain it's more of the kind of I mean if I were to show you an elephant brain here you'd see the surface area it's very different it is very wrinkled like tissue patent but just the you can look at that brain and say okay that evolutionary trajectory is different than anticipations so so different than in primates it's so interesting because if you look at the different mammal groups even Birds right you can kind of tell who's who maybe not the species but whether that's an elephant or a cow or a hyena or a primate or a dolphin or a manatee because as a general look a general shape that characterizes all those groups there's a lot of variability in dolphin and whale brains but you never mistake a dolphin and we'll bring for a primary elephant accuse about 2.53 so do mysticetes the baleen whales and those guys have the dual auditory pathways I don't know the reason is because we've not done the studies we don't have a lot of messy brains to put in a scanner the brains that we use were dolphin modern dolphin brains they will post-mortem we put them in the scanner went home came back the next day that's how much scanning was involved in getting through getting those slices I don't know if I had to guess I'd say maybe because maybe the echolocation is not there now may I could be very well I yeah I wish you know you you become an ambulance chaser and when I was at Emory I would get UPS and FedEx boxes it would be a brain yes they do have a pair of linden globe yes mr. suit brains are very complex and very elaborated there they you know people think Oh mrs. feeds Bailey whatever no no no no they have very complex Springs the curious about I know all the different features of the brains exactly so the question is what about sleep and dolphins and whales well they have something called uni hemispheric sleep right and what that means is you know this two sides of the brain connected by a bridge bone corpus callosum and when we sleep the whole brain goes to sleep both with different stages but when you're asleep you're asleep but when you live in the water and you're a voluntary breather you're an animal who needs to breathe all the time if your whole brain goes to sleep you drown right so half the differing goes to sleep while the other half stays awake what that is in terms of experience what does it mean I mean maybe some of us I mean I I might know after like labs read student study but I mean what is that like to have one half of the brain asleep now one thing we know about how they sleep is they don't go into REM sleep and that's important because we do go into REM sleep you dream what happens when you dream you become limp your body just connects from your brain in a sense imagine being mad at being in the water they don't really sleep or dream well that's right so the function of dreaming I mean we still really don't know but it has a restorative function sleep certainly does and that's why they definitely do sleep how they get along without dreaming whether it is somehow accomplished in some other way you don't really understand you don't know that's a mr. so does EQ measure just size or volume or mass or does it take other features and into account um the answer is that it is strictly a measure of the mass of the brain relative to the mass of the body very good question can you tell what the surface of the brain is like from a CT scan of the inside of a cranium to some extent and the reason is is because the cranium grows tightly around the surface of the skull and has little indentations in it that are like at any print of the surface so we can get a sense we also know that throughout the animal kingdom the big the more convoluted ones put all of that together you can infer that the Argosy brains were small relative to the body and they probably weren't very convoluted human brains were starting to take active scans right PET scans yeah right and and so that's because you can say okay get in there human and relax and then we're going to tell you something and you don't look good look at this card don't even take a picture of your brain right right and so this would be difficult with Wow Barbies carnivorous smart creatures that probably wouldn't cooperate with that but but is there a way to do it without being a form of torture for whales ok well let's turn to the Navy and you don't nothing too serious and that's a great question can you do functional neural imaging not just take pictures of the brain but look at the parts of the brain are more active than others and the only organization or entity that has attempted that is the usme and they have dolphins who are very highly trained they trained them to jump onto structure and they would put them in a stretcher to transfer them to a hospital and put them in a scanner in MRI scan and they you have to hold your head especially still so they were trained to do that and I did see some of the images that God and some of the images they got were interesting I mean they had listening to whistles and the orderto region lit up and so I mean it was a very very interesting methodology it requires the animals to be ultra trained and it's probably not very comfortable and they stopped doing it not because none of the goodness of their heart but because what they were trying to do is understand something about unit hemispheric information processing so they could make soldiers do that well they went on to other things and hopefully you're not gonna make it necessary but that really is the story of how they they came to create those images they're the only ones I know it's done anything like that there were some things like some of these imaging techniques involved injection of radioactive material and it's fine if you do it you know once or twice and you have something that people dr. s define and your body is better than you do that but if you do that repeatedly there's a list obviously so it's not very safe well what's the solution to keeping these animals like Kiska or Lolita or some of these other really bringing individuals and concrete tanks well obviously not supporting that activity but the solution in my view is to start to create seaside sanctuaries where we can transfer these individuals into a more natural environment it's still captivity but debris gets more of what their brain needs for them to thrive the open I mean they want the ocean and the seaside sanctuary you know they have fish that swim through and all kinds of critters and they and a lot of space and it's the tides as weather and you know you try to do the sanctuary for any animal it's to give back as much of the natural environment as you possibly can so that's my view is sanctuary seaside sanctuaries are the next step in revolving out of keeping these animals and performance tanks um why is tokete a lasted so long she's 53 54 years old I this is not a satisfying answer there are individual differences just like there are in humans right some people a very you know they thought and watching the scary movie other people are really resilient some people are tougher in one circumstance and we've done another at 7-7 so we're all different we all have personality features and you know resilience it's like that with the orcas she happens to be a very resilient tough well no I don't think so because she's in a really small tank and quite frankly she's not getting the care that she would even get at SeaWorld so I think it's her I think it's a testament to her resilience to keep going to keep finding others go into the tanks and they're gone a few months later so it's just like you know everyone just like that but that's so how come you know we saw that the work here this is where that's the one yeah the only measure so here here's a white-sided dolphin common dolphin rough tube dolphin they're all literally a and of the Orca so there's a couple things I didn't tell you that I'm going to tell you now like it is that the equ pictures a little bit more complicated okay generally is the case but it turns out that it's a really teeny tiny like a mouse or if you're big like an orca or a baleen whale it kind of gets funky up here and so while it is the case that orchids have big brings to their bodies it's kind of underestimated because they have much bigger bodies than don't yeah if you look at the EQ of baleen whales really low it's the one we don't even look at that because we know there's something not quite right about that measure so it's a little curvilinear now that does not mean that workers are smarter than dolphins what it means is simply that when you look at a single measure like that it tells you something but that may not be the moment other questions yeah I don't know if captive whales could be reintegrated first you'd have to find the pod most of them were born in the tanks so there's no pod to find um they lacked survival skills they laughs a social group it would be very very difficult if not impossible [Music] or those extra well you're asking about the level convolutions on the brain yes so let's think about that extra volume means extra brain tissue the brain tissue is doing something right you know it's so interesting CLIs and i was growing up people say oh people lose ten percent of their brains you know and that's obviously not true we use 100 percent of our brains all the time 24/7 how do I know that because our brains are so expensive metabolically there's no way we would have one extra cell if we need it so those brains are the same if there's a lot of tissue in particular area it's not a nerve it's doing that's a good question back there [Music] [Music] well I participate my question is what about policy for active work boots and other dolphins and whales I participated in many many efforts legislative and so forth to face out one of them was in Canada if you recall they just passed this incredible legislation to ban dolphin and whale display throughout the country I testified that that kind of thing not directly policy but just lending the science when it's needed you know how largest sanctuaries how much space student these whales needs for six to eight orcas about a hundred acres that's what they pull the carrying capacity that gives them enough dispersal space depth a separation if needed if they don't get along but that's about 300 times the size of the largest tank so just to give you a comparison well if we had a big enough sanctuary the idea is to create one and then others create more until we have them all in Seaside sanctuaries instead of tanks so this is something that a lot of people are doing around the world and these are not small projects as you could imagine but you know no one you team can do all of them there are about 22 orchids in North America alone in concrete tanks around the world I you know in between Russia and China and South America and a few other places you know I have no idea because they just keep grabbing them in the ocean but the thing you need to do is stop them from breeding and then move them into a better environment to kind of phase out that kind of living well I'm available to talk with anyone it will be on the equal insulating topic of sea otters

Channel: Whale Sanctuary Project

Views: 19,658

Keywords: whales, marine mammals, animal protection, sanctuary

Id: eaCaPwbKWSo

Length: 69min 49sec (4189 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 26 2019