There is a world somewhere between reality and fiction. Although ignored by many, it is very real and so are those living in it. This forum is about the natural world. Here, wild animals will be heard and respected. The forum offers a glimpse into an unknown world as well as a room with a view on the present and the future. Anyone able to speak on behalf of those living in the emerald forest and the deep blue sea is invited to join.
So can you explain how there can be domination, when some species is prey to another and they can´t protect their calves from attacks and getting eaten? Even when they are in packs/pods and doing all what they can to make predators to give up/flee. I am waiting with interest if you can explain it in some reasonable way?
I mean with your own words, I don´t need to see articles, which I´ve seen many times in past.
So can you explain how there can be domination, when some species is prey to another and they can´t protect their calves from attacks and getting eaten? Even when they are in packs/pods and doing all what they can to make predators to give up/flee. I am waiting with interest if you can explain it in some reasonable way?
I mean with your own words, I don´t need to see articles, which I´ve seen many times in past.
I don´t see any justification for your claim. I understand domination really something like what lions do to hyenas. Hyenas don´t even dare to try to attack lion cubs, when pride is there and especially if male lion present. Orcas attack humpback whales no matter what when they are hunting. Humpback whales are in those occasions prey and even though not helpless, I don´t remember claims, that they would have killed orcas. Your comparison looks for me very odd and far fetched. Domination is for me something very different than what you now try to suggest.
So can you explain how there can be domination, when some species is prey to another and they can´t protect their calves from attacks and getting eaten? Even when they are in packs/pods and doing all what they can to make predators to give up/flee. I am waiting with interest if you can explain it in some reasonable way?
I mean with your own words, I don´t need to see articles, which I´ve seen many times in past.
I don´t see any justification for your claim. I understand domination really something like what lions do to hyenas. Hyenas don´t even dare to try to attack lion cubs, when pride is there and especially if male lion present. Orcas attack humpback whales no matter what when they are hunting. Humpback whales are in those occasions prey and even though not helpless, I don´t remember claims, that they would have killed orcas. Your comparison looks for me very odd and far fetched. Domination is for me something very different than what you now try to suggest.
Now do you see what I mean? Hyenas can snatch lion cubs, even with adult lions being present:
So can you explain how there can be domination, when some species is prey to another and they can´t protect their calves from attacks and getting eaten? Even when they are in packs/pods and doing all what they can to make predators to give up/flee. I am waiting with interest if you can explain it in some reasonable way?
I mean with your own words, I don´t need to see articles, which I´ve seen many times in past.
I don´t see any justification for your claim. I understand domination really something like what lions do to hyenas. Hyenas don´t even dare to try to attack lion cubs, when pride is there and especially if male lion present. Orcas attack humpback whales no matter what when they are hunting. Humpback whales are in those occasions prey and even though not helpless, I don´t remember claims, that they would have killed orcas. Your comparison looks for me very odd and far fetched. Domination is for me something very different than what you now try to suggest.
Now do you see what I mean? Hyenas can snatch lion cubs, even with adult lions being present:
I´m sorry but what you try to say is absurd. Your comparisons make no sense really and I haven´t seen you explaining where do you see domination in any reasonable way. This starts to turn into rubbish, imo, just like some lion-tiger things in past.
That video which you linked was also, sorry to say, rubbish. Hyenas can take lion cub, when adult lions aren´t there present. Lions leave cubs sometimes alone, when they hunt etc. and that is very risky. Cubs can also be too far from adults by accident and in such cases hyenas can use opportunity. But when cubs are with pride and adults close, it´s a different thing. Hyenas don´t hunt lion cubs, they use opportunity if such happens. When we talk about orcas and humpback whales, orcas hunt humpback whales, they go for calves no matter if there is lone calf (for some reason) or calf/calves protected by adult humpbacks.
I could imagine, that great white shark could attack an orca calf in same way as hyenas can go for lion cub. But I wonder if sharks have courage to do so, when knowing how much they are afraid of orcas. It looks like, that they fear more orcas than hyenas fear lions. Then again orcas don´t seem to be afraid of anything in the oceans.
Anyway what comes to this, best to keep this in baleen whales thread from now on. Or if you want to write about megalodons, which seems to be your bigger agenda behind many latest postings, then megalodon thread. I check later if this thread needs to be cleaned a bit from postings, which aren´t so much about great white sharks.
So can you explain how there can be domination, when some species is prey to another and they can´t protect their calves from attacks and getting eaten? Even when they are in packs/pods and doing all what they can to make predators to give up/flee. I am waiting with interest if you can explain it in some reasonable way?
I mean with your own words, I don´t need to see articles, which I´ve seen many times in past.
I don´t see any justification for your claim. I understand domination really something like what lions do to hyenas. Hyenas don´t even dare to try to attack lion cubs, when pride is there and especially if male lion present. Orcas attack humpback whales no matter what when they are hunting. Humpback whales are in those occasions prey and even though not helpless, I don´t remember claims, that they would have killed orcas. Your comparison looks for me very odd and far fetched. Domination is for me something very different than what you now try to suggest.
Now do you see what I mean? Hyenas can snatch lion cubs, even with adult lions being present:
I´m sorry but what you try to say is absurd. Your comparisons make no sense really and I haven´t seen you explaining where do you see domination in any reasonable way. This starts to turn into rubbish, imo, just like some lion-tiger things in past.
That video which you linked was also, sorry to say, rubbish. Hyenas can take lion cub, when adult lions aren´t there present. Lions leave cubs sometimes alone, when they hunt etc. and that is very risky. Cubs can also be too far from adults by accident and in such cases hyenas can use opportunity. But when cubs are with pride and adults close, it´s a different thing. Hyenas don´t hunt lion cubs, they use opportunity if such happens. When we talk about orcas and humpback whales, orcas hunt humpback whales, they go for calves no matter if there is lone calf (for some reason) or calf/calves protected by adult humpbacks.
I could imagine, that great white shark could attack an orca calf in same way as hyenas can go for lion cub. But I wonder if sharks have courage to do so, when knowing how much they are afraid of orcas. It looks like, that they fear more orcas than hyenas fear lions. Then again orcas don´t seem to be afraid of anything in the oceans.
Anyway what comes to this, best to keep this in baleen whales thread from now on. Or if you want to write about megalodons, which seems to be your bigger agenda behind many latest postings, then megalodon thread. I check later if this thread needs to be cleaned a bit from postings, which aren´t so much about great white sharks.
About what I meant about the relationship between humpbacks and orcas, see the other thread.
(08-19-2020, 03:18 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: Though it was a juvenile, it was much bigger than Helen the shark, about 3 times (and measuring 32–33 ft or 9.7536–10.0584 m), so that was incredible! Humpback whales (Megaptera novæangliæ) have been seen to fight or dominate orcas or killer whales (Orcinus orca), which in turn dominate GW sharks, so if a GW shark can do that to a much bigger creature, then what could Megalodon have done to Livyatan melvillei? https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-megalod...#pid124473
I was reading the entire topic, plus the one of the “Baleen whales”, and I saw the conclusions of @”Bornean tiger” and are frankly biased toward the sharks with no logic sense. @”Shadow” made a good job trying to show how weird and even rubbish are these claims but when I read THIS post above, from Bornean Tiger, it became a red alert for me, as this level of comments are found only in the “fans boys” discussions in Youtube or forums like Carnivora. So, I will take a time to correct these ideas and to show how illogic they are.
1. White shark interaction with orcas:
It is well know that orcas dominate over sharks of any species, but it seems that there is a group of “fan boys” of sharks that still try to prove, sometimes at the level of stupidity, that the great and magnificent white shark is actually a match for the overgrow black dolphin. However the real fact is that the white shark is not a match for the orca in a one-to-one fight, leave out a group of orcas.
If we focus on size, the biggest white sharks may reach 6 meters long, some records suggest up to 6.4 meters and hypothetically up to 7 meters, the heaviest white shark reported did not surpassed the 3.5 tons and most of them do not surpass the 2 tons. On the orca side, the biggest orcas actually measured surpass the 9 meters and weight between 6 to 8 tons, there is no way that a white shark can compete with these. Interestingly the female orcas are the one that more often hunt sharks and from the small to medium populations that measure about the same length of the largest white sharks (6-7 meters) but even then already weight more (more than 4 tons).
Now, if we focus in intelligence, certainly the comparison is even more futile. There are studies of socialization on sharks, but you must take in count that this “socialization” is just basal and compared to snakes and are by no means at the same level of the mammals, even crocodiles are more social than white shark (at least they take care of they young and recognize the paper of the dominat male in the area). What they observed in white sharks is just opportunistic behavior that can be seen in crocodiles when several of them may join to kill an animal and eat it, but that do not means that this is cooperation at all. Now this can’t be compare with the socialization of the orcas, which are among the most intelligent animals on Earth, with one of the more complex social lives, they even have they own culture and language depending or the region, is like to try to compare the social life of an anaconda against the one of the elephant!
From any side that you see it, there is no comparison, and there are several documents that show that orcas clearly dominate over white sharks and even hunt them selectively.
Check this video, is in Spanish, but you can see the four sharks that were killed in that moment, two of them of over 5 meters long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV49x5M2TKg
2. White shark predation on humpback whale:
This is a very interesting case, but using only the superficial information do not show the true case. In the same articles that Bornean Tiger presented (this one in particular: https://www.newsweek.com/great-white-sha...le-1492244), it clearly say that the whale was of 7 meters long (not 9 or 10 meters), that is hardly even a young adult! Also check the description of the poor whale: “On inspection, they found a 23ft cetacean in poor health. Not only had it been caught in rope, but it was scrawny, covered in barnacles and crawling with whale lice.”
This was a small and in very bad shape whale calf and the other sharks clearly took advantage of this. The biggest of the sharks measured about 4 meters, clearly a full adult.
Also one of the experts said this: "We acknowledge that this was a singular event, a consequence of the whale being entangled and in poor condition," the researchers write. "Therefore, the event should not reflect all white shark attacks on live baleen whales. Nevertheless, this paper presents observations on a rarely observed interaction between white sharks and live whales."
So one single event about an opportunistic behavior is not evidence that white sharks predate on live whales at all, this is something exclusive of the orcas.
3. Humpback whales and orcas:
This is should not be surprising by anyone that had studied predators and prey relationship. Normally most of the whales do not have any defence against the attack of orcas, apart from speed. At this moment only humpback whales and the male of sperm whale are the only ones that had succeeded in stop the attack of orcas, but is this evidence of domination? The obvious answer is NO, after all the humpback whales are prey of orcas and they did hunt on the adults, but like any predator they will target mostly the calves. This is also shown in the large land predators like lions or wolves (I make this comparison as orcas hunt in packs, like these other two apex predators). @”Shadow” presented the perfect example so I don’t understand how is that @”Bornean Tiger” can’t see the logic on this. Lions and wolves hunt over African buffaloes and Bison respectively, they normally target the young specimens and when they can, they will target the adults ones, the same happen with orcas. Also, I mention the bovids as they are the only animals that normally fight back and may even injure its predators, so the humpback whales seems to be the equivalent, but at the end of the day the big whale is the prey and the large dolphin is the predator and nobody will say that the buffaloes “dominate” on the lions of the bison “dominate” on the wolves. It is so clear and logic.
4. Competition and domination:
It is quite clear that there is confusion in the terms “competition” and “domination” in these two topics. Predators that search the same prey base are competitors, like tiger-leopard-dhole or lion-hyena-leopard or wolf-puma-coyote, to give a few examples. However domination is when these competitors in the same ecological niche have the ability to control the habitat and suppress its competitors based in side and/or numbers, like the tiger with the leopard-dhole, or the lion with the hyena-leopard, or the wolf with the puma-coyote. Under this case, orcas and white sharks are competitors as they exploit the same ecological niche in some areas, but when these two coexist, the orca suppress and even predate on the white shark, so the mammal dominate the shark.
Now, this applies to orcas and humpback whales? Obviously not, there is no domination at all, here there is a relation between predator and prey, the predator attack and the prey defend itself. They do not share the same ecological niche and do not prey on the same animals. Only in the case of the resident orcas in the northwest of USA and Canada we can see coexistence with the humpback whale as both eat fish and these orcas do not predate on the whales and even then they are just competitors and no study had reported domination.
Finally, the clarification: white sharks do NOT dominate on humpback whales as coyotes do not dominate on bison, and humpback whales do NOT dominate on orcas as buffalo/bison do not dominate on lion/wolf. In this case, the idea that Carcharocles (O.) megalodon dominated over Livyatan melvillei based in this nonsense is rubbish and can be discarded with no effort.
In fact, it is fair to explain, again, which was the world of the “megalodon”. The idea that the "megalodon" was a giant white shark that hunted huge sperm whales (that do not even existed in those days, by the way) and that fought with pack of large orcas is a MYTH created long time ago and dragged by "fans" in the web. The true is that must of the whales in that time were very small, at about 6 meters in length, that most of the C. (o.) megalodon were about 10 meters in length (from tip of snout to tip of the tail fin) and where NOT giant versions of white sharks, also were not very fast swimmers. And finally the orcas that lived in those days were small, of about the same of the modern false killer whale and with similar diets. The Livyatan melvillei was a true competitor of the giant shark, but competitor do not mean that they run against each other at every moment, which is also a childlike idea of the "fans" at the web.
I hope this will clarify some points, I don’t mean to be rude, but certainly when a poster start showing ideas with no fundament and that clearly shows a biased position about a case or species, is our duty to provide the information to correct those situations.
(08-19-2020, 03:18 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: Though it was a juvenile, it was much bigger than Helen the shark, about 3 times (and measuring 32–33 ft or 9.7536–10.0584 m), so that was incredible! Humpback whales (Megaptera novæangliæ) have been seen to fight or dominate orcas or killer whales (Orcinus orca), which in turn dominate GW sharks, so if a GW shark can do that to a much bigger creature, then what could Megalodon have done to Livyatan melvillei? https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-megalod...#pid124473
I was reading the entire topic, plus the one of the “Baleen whales”, and I saw the conclusions of @”Bornean tiger” and are frankly biased toward the sharks with no logic sense. @”Shadow” made a good job trying to show how weird and even rubbish are these claims but when I read THIS post above, from Bornean Tiger, it became a red alert for me, as this level of comments are found only in the “fans boys” discussions in Youtube or forums like Carnivora. So, I will take a time to correct these ideas and to show how illogic they are.
1. White shark interaction with orcas:
It is well know that orcas dominate over sharks of any species, but it seems that there is a group of “fan boys” of sharks that still try to prove, sometimes at the level of stupidity, that the great and magnificent white shark is actually a match for the overgrow black dolphin. However the real fact is that the white shark is not a match for the orca in a one-to-one fight, leave out a group of orcas.
If we focus on size, the biggest white sharks may reach 6 meters long, some records suggest up to 6.4 meters and hypothetically up to 7 meters, the heaviest white shark reported did not surpassed the 3.5 tons and most of them do not surpass the 2 tons. On the orca side, the biggest orcas actually measured surpass the 9 meters and weight between 6 to 8 tons, there is no way that a white shark can compete with these. Interestingly the female orcas are the one that more often hunt sharks and from the small to medium populations that measure about the same length of the largest white sharks (6-7 meters) but even then already weight more (more than 4 tons).
Now, if we focus in intelligence, certainly the comparison is even more futile. There are studies of socialization on sharks, but you must take in count that this “socialization” is just basal and compared to snakes and are by no means at the same level of the mammals, even crocodiles are more social than white shark (at least they take care of they young and recognize the paper of the dominat male in the area). What they observed in white sharks is just opportunistic behavior that can be seen in crocodiles when several of them may join to kill an animal and eat it, but that do not means that this is cooperation at all. Now this can’t be compare with the socialization of the orcas, which are among the most intelligent animals on Earth, with one of the more complex social lives, they even have they own culture and language depending or the region, is like to try to compare the social life of an anaconda against the one of the elephant!
From any side that you see it, there is no comparison, and there are several documents that show that orcas clearly dominate over white sharks and even hunt them selectively.
Check this video, is in Spanish, but you can see the four sharks that were killed in that moment, two of them of over 5 meters long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV49x5M2TKg
2. White shark predation on humpback whale:
This is a very interesting case, but using only the superficial information do not show the true case. In the same articles that Bornean Tiger presented (this one in particular: https://www.newsweek.com/great-white-sha...le-1492244), it clearly say that the whale was of 7 meters long (not 9 or 10 meters), that is hardly even a young adult! Also check the description of the poor whale: “On inspection, they found a 23ft cetacean in poor health. Not only had it been caught in rope, but it was scrawny, covered in barnacles and crawling with whale lice.”
This was a small and in very bad shape whale calf and the other sharks clearly took advantage of this. The biggest of the sharks measured about 4 meters, clearly a full adult.
Also one of the experts said this: "We acknowledge that this was a singular event, a consequence of the whale being entangled and in poor condition," the researchers write. "Therefore, the event should not reflect all white shark attacks on live baleen whales. Nevertheless, this paper presents observations on a rarely observed interaction between white sharks and live whales."
So one single event about an opportunistic behavior is not evidence that white sharks predate on live whales at all, this is something exclusive of the orcas.
3. Humpback whales and orcas:
This is should not be surprising by anyone that had studied predators and prey relationship. Normally most of the whales do not have any defence against the attack of orcas, apart from speed. At this moment only humpback whales and the male of sperm whale are the only ones that had succeeded in stop the attack of orcas, but is this evidence of domination? The obvious answer is NO, after all the humpback whales are prey of orcas and they did hunt on the adults, but like any predator they will target mostly the calves. This is also shown in the large land predators like lions or wolves (I make this comparison as orcas hunt in packs, like these other two apex predators). @”Shadow” presented the perfect example so I don’t understand how is that @”Bornean Tiger” can’t see the logic on this. Lions and wolves hunt over African buffaloes and Bison respectively, they normally target the young specimens and when they can, they will target the adults ones, the same happen with orcas. Also, I mention the bovids as they are the only animals that normally fight back and may even injure its predators, so the humpback whales seems to be the equivalent, but at the end of the day the big whale is the prey and the large dolphin is the predator and nobody will say that the buffaloes “dominate” on the lions of the bison “dominate” on the wolves. It is so clear and logic.
4. Competition and domination:
It is quite clear that there is confusion in the terms “competition” and “domination” in these two topics. Predators that search the same prey base are competitors, like tiger-leopard-dhole or lion-hyena-leopard or wolf-puma-coyote, to give a few examples. However domination is when these competitors in the same ecological niche have the ability to control the habitat and suppress its competitors based in side and/or numbers, like the tiger with the leopard-dhole, or the lion with the hyena-leopard, or the wolf with the puma-coyote. Under this case, orcas and white sharks are competitors as they exploit the same ecological niche in some areas, but when these two coexist, the orca suppress and even predate on the white shark, so the mammal dominate the shark.
Now, this applies to orcas and humpback whales? Obviously not, there is no domination at all, here there is a relation between predator and prey, the predator attack and the prey defend itself. They do not share the same ecological niche and do not prey on the same animals. Only in the case of the resident orcas in the northwest of USA and Canada we can see coexistence with the humpback whale as both eat fish and these orcas do not predate on the whales and even then they are just competitors and no study had reported domination.
Finally, the clarification: white sharks do NOT dominate on humpback whales as coyotes do not dominate on bison, and humpback whales do NOT dominate on orcas as buffalo/bison do not dominate on lion/wolf. In this case, the idea that Carcharocles (O.) megalodon dominated over Livyatan melvillei based in this nonsense is rubbish and can be discarded with no effort.
In fact, it is fair to explain, again, which was the world of the “megalodon”. The idea that the "megalodon" was a giant white shark that hunted huge sperm whales (that do not even existed in those days, by the way) and that fought with pack of large orcas is a MYTH created long time ago and dragged by "fans" in the web. The true is that must of the whales in that time were very small, at about 6 meters in length, that most of the C. (o.) megalodon were about 10 meters in length (from tip of snout to tip of the tail fin) and where NOT giant versions of white sharks, also were not very fast swimmers. And finally the orcas that lived in those days were small, of about the same of the modern false killer whale and with similar diets. The Livyatan melvillei was a true competitor of the giant shark, but competitor do not mean that they run against each other at every moment, which is also a childlike idea of the "fans" at the web.
I hope this will clarify some points, I don’t mean to be rude, but certainly when a poster start showing ideas with no fundament and that clearly shows a biased position about a case or species, is our duty to provide the information to correct those situations.
Greetings to all.
You are right, that this same overall issue has spread out now to too many threads in unnecessary way. And with reasoning, which I find to be invalid. It happens sometimes, but at some point it has to stop because it creates total mess to different threads just like now has happened.
08-27-2020, 08:19 PM( This post was last modified: 08-27-2020, 11:16 PM by BorneanTiger )
(08-26-2020, 01:06 PM)Shadow Wrote:
(08-26-2020, 06:30 AM)GuateGojira Wrote:
(08-19-2020, 03:18 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: Though it was a juvenile, it was much bigger than Helen the shark, about 3 times (and measuring 32–33 ft or 9.7536–10.0584 m), so that was incredible! Humpback whales (Megaptera novæangliæ) have been seen to fight or dominate orcas or killer whales (Orcinus orca), which in turn dominate GW sharks, so if a GW shark can do that to a much bigger creature, then what could Megalodon have done to Livyatan melvillei? https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-megalod...#pid124473
I was reading the entire topic, plus the one of the “Baleen whales”, and I saw the conclusions of @”Bornean tiger” and are frankly biased toward the sharks with no logic sense. @”Shadow” made a good job trying to show how weird and even rubbish are these claims but when I read THIS post above, from Bornean Tiger, it became a red alert for me, as this level of comments are found only in the “fans boys” discussions in Youtube or forums like Carnivora. So, I will take a time to correct these ideas and to show how illogic they are.
1. White shark interaction with orcas:
It is well know that orcas dominate over sharks of any species, but it seems that there is a group of “fan boys” of sharks that still try to prove, sometimes at the level of stupidity, that the great and magnificent white shark is actually a match for the overgrow black dolphin. However the real fact is that the white shark is not a match for the orca in a one-to-one fight, leave out a group of orcas.
If we focus on size, the biggest white sharks may reach 6 meters long, some records suggest up to 6.4 meters and hypothetically up to 7 meters, the heaviest white shark reported did not surpassed the 3.5 tons and most of them do not surpass the 2 tons. On the orca side, the biggest orcas actually measured surpass the 9 meters and weight between 6 to 8 tons, there is no way that a white shark can compete with these. Interestingly the female orcas are the one that more often hunt sharks and from the small to medium populations that measure about the same length of the largest white sharks (6-7 meters) but even then already weight more (more than 4 tons).
Now, if we focus in intelligence, certainly the comparison is even more futile. There are studies of socialization on sharks, but you must take in count that this “socialization” is just basal and compared to snakes and are by no means at the same level of the mammals, even crocodiles are more social than white shark (at least they take care of they young and recognize the paper of the dominat male in the area). What they observed in white sharks is just opportunistic behavior that can be seen in crocodiles when several of them may join to kill an animal and eat it, but that do not means that this is cooperation at all. Now this can’t be compare with the socialization of the orcas, which are among the most intelligent animals on Earth, with one of the more complex social lives, they even have they own culture and language depending or the region, is like to try to compare the social life of an anaconda against the one of the elephant!
From any side that you see it, there is no comparison, and there are several documents that show that orcas clearly dominate over white sharks and even hunt them selectively.
Check this video, is in Spanish, but you can see the four sharks that were killed in that moment, two of them of over 5 meters long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV49x5M2TKg
2. White shark predation on humpback whale:
This is a very interesting case, but using only the superficial information do not show the true case. In the same articles that Bornean Tiger presented (this one in particular: https://www.newsweek.com/great-white-sha...le-1492244), it clearly say that the whale was of 7 meters long (not 9 or 10 meters), that is hardly even a young adult! Also check the description of the poor whale: “On inspection, they found a 23ft cetacean in poor health. Not only had it been caught in rope, but it was scrawny, covered in barnacles and crawling with whale lice.”
This was a small and in very bad shape whale calf and the other sharks clearly took advantage of this. The biggest of the sharks measured about 4 meters, clearly a full adult.
Also one of the experts said this: "We acknowledge that this was a singular event, a consequence of the whale being entangled and in poor condition," the researchers write. "Therefore, the event should not reflect all white shark attacks on live baleen whales. Nevertheless, this paper presents observations on a rarely observed interaction between white sharks and live whales."
So one single event about an opportunistic behavior is not evidence that white sharks predate on live whales at all, this is something exclusive of the orcas.
3. Humpback whales and orcas:
This is should not be surprising by anyone that had studied predators and prey relationship. Normally most of the whales do not have any defence against the attack of orcas, apart from speed. At this moment only humpback whales and the male of sperm whale are the only ones that had succeeded in stop the attack of orcas, but is this evidence of domination? The obvious answer is NO, after all the humpback whales are prey of orcas and they did hunt on the adults, but like any predator they will target mostly the calves. This is also shown in the large land predators like lions or wolves (I make this comparison as orcas hunt in packs, like these other two apex predators). @”Shadow” presented the perfect example so I don’t understand how is that @”Bornean Tiger” can’t see the logic on this. Lions and wolves hunt over African buffaloes and Bison respectively, they normally target the young specimens and when they can, they will target the adults ones, the same happen with orcas. Also, I mention the bovids as they are the only animals that normally fight back and may even injure its predators, so the humpback whales seems to be the equivalent, but at the end of the day the big whale is the prey and the large dolphin is the predator and nobody will say that the buffaloes “dominate” on the lions of the bison “dominate” on the wolves. It is so clear and logic.
4. Competition and domination:
It is quite clear that there is confusion in the terms “competition” and “domination” in these two topics. Predators that search the same prey base are competitors, like tiger-leopard-dhole or lion-hyena-leopard or wolf-puma-coyote, to give a few examples. However domination is when these competitors in the same ecological niche have the ability to control the habitat and suppress its competitors based in side and/or numbers, like the tiger with the leopard-dhole, or the lion with the hyena-leopard, or the wolf with the puma-coyote. Under this case, orcas and white sharks are competitors as they exploit the same ecological niche in some areas, but when these two coexist, the orca suppress and even predate on the white shark, so the mammal dominate the shark.
Now, this applies to orcas and humpback whales? Obviously not, there is no domination at all, here there is a relation between predator and prey, the predator attack and the prey defend itself. They do not share the same ecological niche and do not prey on the same animals. Only in the case of the resident orcas in the northwest of USA and Canada we can see coexistence with the humpback whale as both eat fish and these orcas do not predate on the whales and even then they are just competitors and no study had reported domination.
Finally, the clarification: white sharks do NOT dominate on humpback whales as coyotes do not dominate on bison, and humpback whales do NOT dominate on orcas as buffalo/bison do not dominate on lion/wolf. In this case, the idea that Carcharocles (O.) megalodon dominated over Livyatan melvillei based in this nonsense is rubbish and can be discarded with no effort.
In fact, it is fair to explain, again, which was the world of the “megalodon”. The idea that the "megalodon" was a giant white shark that hunted huge sperm whales (that do not even existed in those days, by the way) and that fought with pack of large orcas is a MYTH created long time ago and dragged by "fans" in the web. The true is that must of the whales in that time were very small, at about 6 meters in length, that most of the C. (o.) megalodon were about 10 meters in length (from tip of snout to tip of the tail fin) and where NOT giant versions of white sharks, also were not very fast swimmers. And finally the orcas that lived in those days were small, of about the same of the modern false killer whale and with similar diets. The Livyatan melvillei was a true competitor of the giant shark, but competitor do not mean that they run against each other at every moment, which is also a childlike idea of the "fans" at the web.
I hope this will clarify some points, I don’t mean to be rude, but certainly when a poster start showing ideas with no fundament and that clearly shows a biased position about a case or species, is our duty to provide the information to correct those situations.
Greetings to all.
You are right, that this same overall issue has spread out now to too many threads in unnecessary way. And with reasoning, which I find to be invalid. It happens sometimes, but at some point it has to stop because it creates total mess to different threads just like now has happened.
I never said that GW's dominate humpbacks, that Megalodon was a prehistoric version (or even a close relative) of the GW, or that GW's are "cooler" than orcas (referring to Guate's comment in the other thread), but I hope that we can agree on this:
Orcas dominate GW's and other sharks, and some great whites have been seen to prey on juvenile humpbacks which are larger than them. Not only did 2 GW's hunt a juvenile in poor condition that measured 23 ft (7.0104 m) in February, 2017, off the coast of South Africa, but also last month, off the coast of the same country, a GW called "Helen" took down a juvenile but much larger (about 3 times) humpback measuring 32–33 ft or 9.7536–10.0584 m), as mentioned by PCTS.
(08-27-2020, 08:19 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: I never said that GW's dominate humpbacks, that Megalodon was a prehistoric version (or even a close relative) of the GW, or that GW's are "cooler" than orcas (referring to Guate's comment in the other thread), but I hope that we can agree on this:
Orcas dominate GW's and other sharks, and some great whites have been seen to prey on juvenile humpbacks which are larger than them. Not only did 2 GW's hunt a juvenile in poor condition that measured 23 ft (7.0104 m) in February, 2017, off the coast of South Africa, but also last month, off the coast of the same country, a GW called "Helen" took down a juvenile but much larger (about 3 times) humpback measuring 32–33 ft or 9.7536–10.0584 m), as mentioned by PCTS.
1 - White sharks are not close relatives of the Carcharocles (Otodus) megalodon. In fact, depending of where it is clasiffied, is still out of the line of the white sharks Carcharodon carcharias, check this evolutionary line:
*This image is copyright of its original author
If the "megalodon" was a Carcharocles, then the relation with the white shark is like the relation of a lynx with a lion, and if it was Otodus, the relation will be like the Smilodon with the lion, in both cases are not a close relative at all.
2 - About the predation of white sharks to juveline humback whales, a took a read to the three articles and these are important points, copy past from the articles:
a. The whale was entangled in a net.
b. The whale was young and had been left behind by the rest of the group, making it vulnerable.
c. This whale was so weakened that it gave the shark the upper hand and thus confidence to instigate the attack.
d. This behavior is very rare and requires a number of aspects to all come together to be possible. A weak whale passing through a great white hot spot, and then a large and confident great white encountering it.
e. Helen, realizing her opponent was frail and alone, was able to calculate whether she could succeed with a drowning offensive.
After these details, it is clear that the white shark was inteligent enough to detect that the animal was weak, a level of inteligence also found in crocodiles or Komodo dragons, so overall is nothing extreamly exceptional. Also it was strong enough to take advantage and kill the prey, but the prey wa also vulnerable, frail and alone, plus the fact that was juvenil, so this attack ca be compared to the attack of lions and tigers on juvenile elephants, which are big but will not fight back like an adult specimen, plus the fact that those cases are rare. What we see here are exceptional cases and like researcher Ryan Johnson said, these are rare acases and requires a number of aspects to all come together to be possible.
Great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias)
