More And More Orcas Have Started Using Fishing Lines As Free Buffets

[Judi Lynn]

Haters will call it stealing, but scientists call it innovating.

By
Hilary Hanson
02/05/2022 02:52pm EST

Give an orca some fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Try to keep your fish from an orca, and he’ll figure out how to eat them — and teach all his friends to do the same.

Orcas, also known as killer whales, have long been known to dine on fish that people have caught in lines or nets. And a new paper examining the phenomenon paints a picture of how the socially complex animals respond to their environment being altered by human activity.

The paper, published in the journal Biology Letters, analyzed years of data involving two different killer whale populations near the Crozet Islands in the Indian Ocean.

Since the 1990s, the region has been a hotspot for commercial fishing of the Patagonian toothfish — a fish often marketed under the name “Chilean sea bass.” The toothfish are caught on longlines along the bottom of the ocean floor, meaning that one big fishing line is baited with many hooks and each hook nabs an individual fish.

More:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/orcas-fishing-lines-teaching_n_61fe9c1fe4b06abdc430cbc0

[niyad]

1. Good for the orcas. They were there first.

[2naSalit]

2. +1

[Bayard]

3. Article doesn't say how the Orca keeps from being caught

By the fishing line with many hooks.

But taking advantage of humans--not a bad thing.