ORCAS - BIOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, COMMUNICATION

hey everyone welcome in the seventh presentation where we're going to learn about the biology the communication and the sociology of Oracle's first of all let's have a look on the shape and the colors here is the body of orcas and this body is perfectly made for swimming in the ocean it looks like a huge torpedo and you can see also this large pectoral fin and this pectoral fin are made to control the direction and also on the top of the back the dorsal fin which is a kind of foil to stabilize the swim back to this body is the flick and this flick is a powerful flick for swimming very fast the colors now the orcas is black and white the back is black with a gray saddle patch and you can see the eye patch close to the eye which is white and the belly which is white also we can easily recognize the male from the females first with the dorsal fin the male's they have a very high and straight dorsal fin it can be almost 2 meters tall the female compared to the males have a shorter and curved dorsal fin which is aprox 60 centimeters or 80 centimeters the second thing to recognize the males and females are the pectoral fin the males have much larger pectoral fins and then also we have a third way to recognize males and females but for that we have to watch the belly and the distance between the urine orifice and genital orifice which is larger to the males and shorter with the female and you can see also the place for milking inside this body there are organs and are the same organs we human have or all the mammals have because they are mammals now the brain has lungs to have liver they have stomach intestine everything is the same same organs let's have a look on the skeleton we can first see this long strong and powerful spine with very large vertebrae the spine is very flexible to transfer the power to the free for the swimming then we can see also the ribs a very large ribs for very large lungs separated by the sternum close to sternum we can see something looking like a hand and actually it is a hand inside the pectoral fin and they have almost the same bones than we have in the fingers close to the middle of the body there is what is remaining from the pelvic bone is a very very small bone and last but not least just look at this girl this girl has a powerful jaw and powerful teeth this teeth and this Jo are made to crush the prey let's have a look under some numbers about orcas first the size the size for the male's is between 6 and 8 meters with a max of 10 meters for the females the size is between 5 and 7 meters with a maximum 8 meters and the newborn are about 2.4 meters the way is between 5 and 8 tone for the males with a maximum of 10 tons between 3 and 4 tons for the females with a maximum five six tones and the newborn are about 180 kilos lifespan is interesting estimated in a while adds about 30 years for the males and 6 years for the females we have to be careful with this number because there is a lot of information we don't have we know in British Columbia a female and she was 104 years when she died so it was one case and it doesn't impact the the average lifespan but there is a lot of orcas everywhere in the world there is a lot of datas we miss so we have to be very very careful with this life span into the wild the mortality in the six first month is between 45 and 50 percent it's huge and it's mainly due to the human activities actually the mother orcas they are poisoned by the pesticides and when the mother is milking the baby they go into the milk so while the mother is detoxify herself she's poisoning the baby and the baby he's a fragile organism and this has a huge impact on the immune system so this is a huge mortality and it is not natural at all gestation is between 15 and 18 months the winning occur between 12 and 24 months but we witness in Norway that the the orcas actually start to feed with the herrings the the newborn much before the end of the the milking period body temperature is between 36 and 38 degrees exactly like or body temperature there are mammals that's why and it's very interesting to understand that they have the same enzymatic system and the Sun seemed have to work with a very specific temperature and they have to keep this body temperature that high even in the cold sea in a freezing Arctic or Antarctica and this is the reason why the orcas they need a lot of food if you compare one Orca same size with a white shark for instance let's say five meters average and the white shark in South Africa will maybe eat one cup of seals each week or two weeks while in the same time or cab in the same size will need maybe two or three per day so this is the reason is because the Orca need a lot of energy much more energy to keep the body temperature in this level sexual maturity is between 15 and 20 years for the males and after 10 years for the female with a peak of fertility about 20 years the maximum speed of orcas is estimated at about 60 kilometer per hour there is only three creatures living in the ocean that can be faster the mako shark that can be up to hundred kilometers per hour the salt fish and the tuna but difference is that the orcas they have amazing stamina and they can keep a very high speed for a long time while the others there are more sprinters until recently we thought that the orcas could reach 300 meters maximum while diving and actually recently we had a report of a tiled Orca fishing on the tooth in Pacific and the death was 1087 matters they can dive very deep if they need some worries about the classification they belong to the animal kingdom the film is called data the classes Mammalia order is artiodactyla infraorder is Cetacea they belong to the family of the Delfina day and the genus is Orsino's there is only one species in this genus which is all sinews Orca they are the largest member of the Delfina d family and we can split this family in two part the Delfin in a which are the big dolphin the dolphin with the big such as the bottlenose dolphin common dolphin white-sided dolphin all these are the Delfina name and the globe is a fella named and the Orca the odd robe is a felony because they have a melon and the in this family you have also the pilot whales the first orca the resource dolphin so they are belonging to the Delfy need a family some element of the Sociology the orcas are living in a family group the oldest female of the group is living with the sons and the daughter grandsons granddaughter grand grandsons grand granddaughter the orcas did not mate inside the family group they are mating outside the family group and the result is that one Orca will never live with his father he will live with the oldest female called material we call that the matterif vocal group a newborn will always live in the intimate zone of this mother the first month we know that the mother gives the culture transmit the knowledge to the to the newborn by being close to him but it's the whole pod who is also taking care of the newborn and the juveniles and transmitting the culture one question is what happened when the oldest female time actually we have to remember that before being the oldest female she was the daughter of a material so when the oldest female died each daughter is becoming the material of his own offspring let's enter in the communication system of orcas which is totally fascinating we know that the orcas they have a vocal language they make sounds I've been studying the body language of orcas for many years and they have a complex and very interesting body language they also have a verbal language they use basic sounds they can combine and this is the definition of a language and all this way of communicating I'll described in the moravian equation vocal language a verbal language body language but what I suspect now after all this year of underwater encounter that they also use emotional channel they can communicate emotion to each other and we can feel this emotion when we are diving close to them if you remember the second presentation called the base of you see in the example of you see level 3 interaction it was a big female of material interacting with the divers and you could see her visiting the divers singing and also emitting sounds you could see this female when she was emitting sounds some bubbles getting outside the blowhole actually she's squeezing air in the nozzle bag this is why we can see she is the one who is singing recently my good friend Tony Mayer show me rolled footage of Orca male swimming in the last position the one we are calling the pusher and this footage is really interesting because we can see the body language of this Orca male pointing in the direction with the head and you can see some bubbles getting outside the blowhole and then this Orca will turn a little bit in the right and some bubbles are getting outside that blowhole when I saw this footage I understood immediately what we couldn't suspect before the orcas they are communicating to each others and this guy pusher actually is giving commands in the young orcas swimming in front of him and is choosing one in the left one in the right and is peeking all the time what we couldn't see we couldn't suspect by being in the boat at the same level is that they actually are communicating to each other all the time what are made on this communication there are sounds and the most obvious sounds we can hear all the whistles they are whistling the range of frequency is from 0.5 and 40 kilohertz they use this whistling for close-range communication second sort of sounds we can hear out the first call there are a little bit lower in frequency and it can be used in a group recognition where they are hurting the herrings or also when they coordinate their behavior especially when they are hunting actually these sounds are a dialect a dialect is the some of the calls used by the population of orchids each population of orcas around the world they have their own dialect using sounds for example the Norwegian orcas they have 23 repertory calls while the neighbor in Iceland they have 24 they are not the same because it's not the same population watch this vector graph of a sound you can see that there is first pulse call then you're gonna have a clique theory and at the end of a click serie a whistle [Music] what is interesting is that you see that the whistle in the graph is four lines of frequency while the click Siri has a range of frequency between five and fifty kilohertz and it's a very short sound it's between one and five milliseconds this sound is used for the echo location they are emitting a sound and they are waiting for the echo back and then they can have a picture of the environment even if the target is deep even if the water is trouble they can see with the sound again and have a sound whistle another whistle [Music] and the click Siri [Music] this unique communication system added to the echolocation system permit to the Orca to be in relationship in their environment [Music] they use this sound system to communicate and to echolocate especially when they are hunting when you see a Orca pod traveling you can see orcas in front orcas in the side orcas behind there are breathing at the surface one after the other but when they are hunting the orcas they are on the line it's because they are using the echolocation system it has a sense if for instance they are herding hearing or they are looking for herring and they are spread out and they are swimming in random some orcas they will not have the information in the same time than the others because they are behind and in front of them it's gonna be an orca instead when they are hunting in the line they are all echolocating together and they are all receiving the echo back we have to understand that the orders they are using the sound underwater and the sound speed underwater is not the same than in the air in the air the sound is transmitted at the speed of 350 meters per second in the water the speed is 1440 meter per second so it means that when the orcas are at the surface and they are echolocating at the bottom if the bottom is at 700 meters they will receive the echo back one second later they will have all of them all together in the same time the information back one second later for that they have two coordinates and they are whistling for that they are giving information to each other it's a very complex organization to be efficient to use this communication system we know they are speaking we know they have a language but we cannot measure the level of communication because we don't understand this language so of the intelligent or not is it a high level of intelligence or not we used to compare the intelligence of humans with the other living creatures we are making tools we are making computers while building houses we are building the boats we have radars we have cars we have constructions building we can make everything so it's the evidence of our intelligence but an tapas ologies when they were speaking about intelligence they were using a very simple fact the fact is that the humans they have a bigger brain that the other animals for instance with some creatures with a basic social life such as mice small brain because they have a basic social life and with some monkeys for instant off with some apps they have a bigger brain and have let's say more complex social life and if you compare the brain of an apps and the brain of a human you will see that the human has more loop and is bigger than Earth and this is how we explain the fact that we had the tool the power to be intelligent and one day the one person had this idea to open the skull of the dolphin and then what he could see was remarkable bottlenose dolphin has a bigger brain and more loop inside and one day one person opened the skull of an orca and was even bigger does it mean that the orcas are more intelligent than us we don't know that we don't understand what they say six kilo versus 1.5 kilo remember that people explained that Einstein was a genius because he had a 1.6 kilo brain 100 grams more imagina a brain 6 kilo versus 1.5 kilo they have a huge brain and in the nature there is nothing existing without a reason if they have this sized brain it has to be a reason some people say yes but there are bigger who have a bigger brain bigger organ this is not the reason let's take the example of the Nile crocodile which is also a very big predator they have a small brain but they are bigger if we check in the past for example the t-rex he was also a top predator he was an apex predator at that time but he had a small brain despite the fact he was almost ten tons like orcas and it's not only the size of the brain dr. Laura Moreno which is a neurobiologist has scanned the skull of orcas and what she found out is remarkable because we human we have a place in the brain called the limbic brain which is dedicated to emotions the orchids they have an extra lobe called para limbic brain meaning that there are even more emotional creatures that we can be disconfirm me the fact that I felt what I felt when I was living with them that they are communicating emotions speaking about intelligence we have to think in terms of non manipulative intelligence we humans can prove our intelligence because we are building tools because we have hands and this is a manipulative intelligence intelligence must have different different fields it can be social intelligence it can be environmental intelligence emotional intelligence it's not only mathematic intelligence and to understand this concept of intelligence we have also to be open to what we call the non manipulated intelligence the Orcas they will never build something because they don't have hands that factual thing instead so that doesn't mean there are not intelligence and for me they are really intelligent they can solve problem we have seen that how they have changed the hunting strategy they already intelligence also because they are in balance in their own environment and we are not in balance anymore we are changing this balance and we are impacting very much the life on earth now that we know for sure all your experience all your footage all your pictures of interaction are helpful you can contribute and become contributors of our Facebook page called Jussi oksanen tia you can ask for being a UC ambassador and it's gonna be a great honor for us to include you in our staff of ambassadors if you organize some events seminars workshop works about the Orca behavior or also the how to come close with orcas we're gonna be really happy to take part of it or any other suggestion you may have let's speak about intelligence in the next time and also let's enter a little bit more in this field of the sound in the next presentation thank you everyone for watching this video thank you for your attention and see you soon bye [Music]

Channel: Pierre ROBERT de LATOUR

Views: 28,365

Rating: 4.9908466 out of 5

Keywords: orca, orque, whales

Id: YBfiqbf8NSg

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 01 2020