• hrimfaxi_work@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    I stole this from somewhere:

    We are the only superpredator known to exist. Our best friends are apex predators we allow to live in our homes and treat like children, and we are sufficiently skilled at predation that we have allowed them to give up hunting for survival.

    We accidentally killed enough of the biomass on the planet that we are now in the Anthropocene era, an era of earths history that marks post-humanity in geological terms. We are an extinction event significant enough that we will be measurable in millions of years even if we all died tomorrow.

    We are the only creature known that engages in group play fighting. Other animals play fight, but not in teams. This allowed us to develop tactics, strategy, and so on, and was instrumental in hunting and eventually war.

    We are sufficiently deadly that in order for something to pose a credible threat to us, we have to make it up and give it powers that don’t exist in reality. And even then, most of the time, we still win.

    • _stranger_@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Orcas train in packs, and have been observed passing learned behavioral traits onto others.

      I can only hope they one day rise out of the sea to destroy us all.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They also are the only apex predator that refuses to eat us. Orca overall will eat anything, but each individual orca pod has their own unique diet. This means that if a polar bear is found by the “wrong orcas,” (from the polar bear’s perspective) the polar bear gets eaten. Yup that’s right. The largest and deadliest land predator is prey for orcas. That being said, if an injured seal is near the “right orcas,” since seal isn’t on their menu, they’ll either totally ignore the seal, or maybe bump it towards the shore. Humans are off their menus, and we don’t know why. The last recorded Orca attack in the wild happened in the late 1800s and if the records are to be believed, the human in question was doing everything they could to piss off that orca. The orca in question bit the human, tasted what it had bitten, and immediately let go. The human got a gnarly scar, but kept his arm. (This doesn’t apply to Orcas in captivity that we gave massive psychological trauma to.)

        My theory is that around 200,000 to 250,000 years ago, just as we were getting started as a species, an orca decided to kill a sick, injured, and or young human, and the response that we gave them terrified the orcas that saw it so much that they told all the other orca that you don’t eat the hairless apes. They will kill everyone that tries.

        • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Maybe we just taste bad? Other predators like tigers and leopards also usually don’t eat humans unless they are injured and can’t chase any other prey.

      • leftzero@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        They’ve been sinking boats off the Iberian coast (possibly for fun, possibly for vengeance) for a few years now, so at least some seem to be trying

      • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Get harpooned. They exist only because we allow them to exist.

        I hope they learn to sink cargo ships, supertankers, and yachts with kamikaze attacks; only allowing passage for middle class pleasure vessels should their entire pod be sufficiently fed as tribute.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        i am confident that if orcas took to land they would recognize that a few psychopaths are responsible and that most people just want to watch orcas jump out of the water and have fun

    • Mr Fish@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      We are sufficiently deadly that in order for something to pose a credible threat to us, we have to make it up and give it powers that don’t exist in reality. And even then, most of the time, we still win.

      This is false. We already pose a very real, credible threat to us.

    • Slotos@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      “Superpredator” is not a scientific term. It was used as an “overconsumer” in one publication, as far as I can find, but that meaning doesn’t fit the narrative of your copypasta.
      And we definitely don’t maintain domestication of other predators through our predatory ability. On the contrary, domestication and cultivation of other species is what allows us to domesticate carnivores.

      We are omnivorous vindictive social apes. Don’t take that description lightly.

      We also have two real superpowers:

      • We’re the only animal on the planet that can scale stable social groups into millions while being individually complex. Some glitch of ours broke cranial limitations of the group size that other primates adhere to.
      • We are the only animal to have developed languages with complex grammars. While other animals can exhibit complex signaling systems, and possibly learn grammars we develop, we effortlessly develop and learn grammars that allow us to express novel thoughts without waiting for evolution. Hell, our children develop throwaway languages as a side-effect of playing with each other.

      Everything else is a consequence.

      PS: Blue-green algae would like a word about that “extinction event” claim. PPS: Leave hydrogen unattended for long enough, and it will start arguing on the internet.