Sea otters prey on baby seals, penguins can't resist the temptation of corpses, and as for dolphins... You think it's a little cute thing, it's all old drivers.
(amelia/compilation) I will completely destroy the place of the sea otter in your hearts. Or at least tarnish their reputation as "one of the most cute little animals in the sea." They look so cute when they pull their little paws at each other in an aquarium, frolick with fluttering leaves in California's seaweed forests, or knock sea urchins with stones; yet some of the so cute sea otters develop a disturbing habit of snapping and drowning baby seals.
Watch out for sea otters
When I first heard about this behavior of sea otters from a marine biologist friend, I wasn't entirely convinced they could be so evil. Maybe this kind of bad behavior is just a rumor? But no. Sea otters do attack juvenile seals, and such strange events are not made up and have even been written into the technical literature. In 2010, Heather Harris, a biologist at the California Department of Fisheries and Game, and colleagues reported 19 independent cases of male sea otters trying to mate with juvenile spotted seals (and often causing fatal injuries to the latter), just in one area of Monterey Bay, California, between 2000 and 2002.
Cute sea otters holding hands. Image source: factrange.com
In a scientifically relentless tone — which is the rule of such papers — the journal Aquatic Mammal summed up the incident as three male sea otters "observed harassing, dragging, guarding, and mating with juvenile spotted seals." After the sea otters killed the object of their twisted desires, the torture lasted for 7 days. For young seals, the experience is undoubtedly creepy. Veterinarians later performed a post-mortem examination of the victim and found damage to the seal's nose, eyes, fins and genitals, including vaginal and rectal perforations. For these poor seal babies, this ending is too painful and too puzzling.
Cute little seals. Image source: http://animalsglobe.com/
Why do these male sea otters kill seals? Although strange, mating is a relatively common cause of death even for female sea otters. Male sea otters often grab females from behind and bite her face; about 11 percent of the dead sea otters found between 2000 and 2003 were related to this rude atrocity. However, attempts to mate with seals remain to be explained. The performance of a pair of repeat offenders gives some clues: At least two of the committed sea otters have been held at the Monterey Bay Aquarium as part of a rehabilitation program for stranded and injured sea otters. There is nothing obviously unusual about the recovered sea otters, but their poor early experiences may have made them more aggressive.
Male sea otters compete with other males for mating. Harris and her collaborators speculate that if a male can't find a mating partner because he's young or unable to expel other competitors, he might be looking for a "female replacement"; it could be a young sea otter or, as was the case in their study, a baby seal. This is a particularly serious problem in Monterey Bay, where more male sea otters than females are found. The reason for this population sex ratio bias is unclear, but it has left male sea otters in a difficult position. After being released, the recovered sea otters will return to a competitive environment, and when it's time to find a mating partner, they will be at a disadvantage.
Cute little sea otter. When females cannot be found to mate, adult male sea otters may also use young sea otters as substitutes. Image source: http://dailyotter.org/
Sea otters are not the only representatives of marine life when it comes to frightening behavior. Seals themselves have been observed behaving similarly to sea otters: males attack females. But if you have to choose the "perverted king" of marine vertebrates, it must be the dolphin.
Dolphin: The King of Perversions
Dolphin's eternal smile is closer to the arrogant snooker of "The Simpsons" than to the movie "Feibao", which has a creepy aura. Sure, they occasionally help fishermen catch fish, but dolphins' intelligence and social complexity give them a pattern of behavior that doesn't look as cute as they are on a well-groomed theme park poster.
Dolphin Snooker was always smiling; certainly at the time of the killing in Springfield. Image source: youtube
All along, the entire salty wet crew of DeepWater News has been committed to counteracting the cute image of the dolphin. There is no doubt that dolphins are jerks. Male bottlenose dolphins sometimes group up to target a single female, harassing her relentlessly, forcing her to mate with them, ignoring the female's attempts to escape. Moreover, dolphin sexual assault is not limited to their own race. There have been cases of dolphins trying to force human swimmers, and what is even more frightening is that their penises are capable of grasping. Dolphins kill other marine mammals and fish for fun, as well as babymicide. Recent studies have shown that dolphins also have names for each other — something that only makes them more hairy. I don't want to wake up one day and hear that scientists have discovered dolphin foul language. Seeing dolphins by the sea should be creepy, just like most people do when they see the curved silhouette of a shark.
A flock of cute dolphins. Image source:/sites.google.com/site/dolphinnnsss/
Penguins are not much better
The Latin scientific name of the Adélie penguin is pygoscelis adeliae, and in popular culture it is the protagonist of the "socially awkard penguin meme" (socially awkard penguin meme). Between 1910 and 1913, during the expedition of scientist George Murray Levick and Scott's expedition to Antarctica, the Adélie penguin was one of the species that attracted The Attention of Rivek. On the way back, Lewijk wrote an entire book about seabirds, in which he described the elegant bird this way: "When you first meet the Adélie penguin, you will think of it as a clever little dwarf in an evening dress, with a slightly shiny snow-white chest, black back and shoulders. However, the race also frightened The Léwick, so much so that in the official expedition, his four-page report on "The Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguins" was deliberately deleted and distributed only to a small group of researchers who were considered erudite and cautious and had digested the explicit content.
"Happy birthday to you!" “...... Happy birthday too? Like the grumpy cat, the "social fear penguin" is also a famous meme http://streetcouch.com/.
During a visit to the Adélie penguin colony, the behavior of some of the penguins he called "villain males" shocked Rywick. Male Adélie penguins hook up and mate with other males, injured females, chicks that fall out of their nests, and carcasses. Some male Adélie penguins will even desperately try to have sex with the ground until they ejaculate. Lewijk documented these behaviors as a deviation from the natural norm. "In the eyes of these penguins, there is no crime that is too inferior." He wrote in his diary.
Later researchers rediscovered the phenomenon that Lewik had seen. Rather than saying that these behaviors are abnormal, they are part of the normal behavior of penguins, and in the eyes of male penguins, there are quite a few things that look like female mating postures, and they have very low standards - and interpreting this posture as "consent" triggers this behavior.
In the foreword to Lewick's belated report, douglas russell, an ornithologist at the Museum of Nature in London, and his colleagues mention that such behavior is so ingrained that when researchers pose for a penguin carcass frozen in this pose, many male penguins find the lure of the corpse "irresistible." In a slightly bizarre field study, the same researcher found that "just a frozen penguin head, with white self-adhesive eye circles, and then erected with wire, and piled up with stones, is enough to stimulate male penguins to mate with this pile of stones and leave semen." ”
I think I just made the "social fear penguin" look more socially afraid.
Elegant Adélie penguins. Image source: http://www.photovolcanica.com/
However, as Douglas and colleagues emphasized in the foreword, "this behavior [of the villain male] is clearly different from the human necrophilia.". When animal behavior breaks human taboos, frightened people often easily overlook this fact. The reason Lewik was so frightened was that he was looking at the penguins from a human perspective—as well-dressed gentlemen and noblewomen. The standard of "proper" human behavior is imposed on penguins and vice versa. If such terrible acts all happen in nature, what does this mean for our own actions?
At the end of the day, why should we measure animals by human morality?
What sea otters, dolphins and penguins do to each other in their attempts to mate can sometimes make us sick, but since Victorian times it's just one of the many animal behaviors that have upset us.
What we perceive as an act of deviation from nature actually begins early on – especially violence. For example, in the belly of a mother sand tiger shark, the first embryo that develops to a sufficient size will quickly swallow other babies with whom it shares a womb. In other species, after hatching, war breaks out almost immediately. Cowback heron chicks will peck, harass weaker siblings, and even push their siblings out of their nests, leaving them to scream for their lives. These behaviors led the ornithologist Douglas Mock and his colleagues to write the following sentence: "Sometimes, the pen of natural selection writes murder mysteries on the pages of evolution." ”
The chicks of the bull-backed heron may be cannibalistic. Image source: flickr
Parents can also be as fierce as cannibalistic siblings. During tough years, under pressure to raise the next generation, bird parents may kick eggs out of their nests or kill some chicks so that others can survive. As animal behaviorist Sarah Hrdy has observed, infanticide can have a variety of causes. Ground squirrels, coyotes, and lions may eat pups of the same race as snacks. In a phenomenon known as the "nanny of death," primates who want to be mothers may steal other children and inadvertently starve them to death. In a wild dog herd, a male in a leading position will kill the children of affiliated members to ensure that their offspring get the most food. In many races (including noble lions), amorous males kill babies so that their mothers can mate with them again.
...... Of the universal phenomena of nature that we are reluctant to examine, the above examples are just a few. After all, it's hard to strip our sense of morality from animals, even though they don't, and can't, share our values.
The naturalistic fallacy refers to the erroneous idea that as long as it is "natural", it is good. Nature represents the world as it should be—a state with which we have been alienated and struggled to return. But that's not the case. We are endowed with the ability to be rational, to judge whether our actions are correct or not. It is a grave mistake to look at the so-called "evil deeds" of penguins, dolphins and sea otters by our standards of conduct.
We shouldn't dismiss the creepy side of animal behavior, as Lewick once did: he wrote information about the Adélie penguins into Greek ciphertext and ultimately decided not to publish his findings. Just as we think of the finger-pointing part, the dark side of sea otters, dolphins and penguins is only part of their nature. No animal is made entirely of rainbows, kisses, and kindness.
There are no rainbow unicorns in the real world. Image source: clipartpanda.com
I'm not trying to denigrate these animals. Given the violence and evil that we humans are capable of committing, we are likewise not moral role models. Not to mention that we have put sea otters on the brink of extinction because of their fur, and to this day we continue to confine dolphins to small, claustrophobic and unhealthy environments that are useless except for our amusement. If dolphins do disappear tomorrow, as depicted in the "Guide to the Milky Way" series, I think their farewell message will not be Douglas Adams's "Goodbye, thank you all the fish", but more likely "fuck you".
Nature is not the existence of intrinsic good or intrinsic evil, it is merely itself. If we use natural phenomena as a criterion for judging right and wrong, we are no different from fools. The dark side of seemingly cute animals is also part of their nature, reminding us that nature is not born for our amusement or curiosity. We can find beauty and poetry in nature, but we can also find horror and barbarism, which are indispensable parts of the composition of the natural picture. Darwin knew this. (In the summary section of On the Origin of Species, he writes that "this view of life" is both magnificent and frightening.) If we really want to see sea otters, dolphins, penguins, and other species, we need to accept them all, not just look at the cute pictures that make people look at them.
(So, let's take a look at a picture of dolphin cuteness :)
Image credit: photo by ezeepics studio/shutterstock
(Let's take another picture of a dolphin and get to know the complete real dolphin :)
Image source: http://www.guokr.com/article/195958/
(Edit: ent)
An ai
The Mandarin duck's inseparability is just to prevent derailment, the hard work of the bees has nothing to do with selflessness, the fierceness of the wolf and the friendliness of the dog are just to adapt to the environment... What qualities you humans like and what behaviors you hate, just say well, why take animals on the back.
Hairball control
id：dogemeow
See who still dares to laugh at Teddy!
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