{"id":16125,"date":"2017-08-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-08-15T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/live-hakamagwp.pantheonsite.io\/features\/power-compassion"},"modified":"2022-09-07T08:44:27","modified_gmt":"2022-09-07T15:44:27","slug":"power-compassion","status":"publish","type":"custom_features","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/features\/power-compassion\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Compassion"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was in university, a pub owner offered me a job as bouncer. He reasoned that folks would be less likely to get into a brawl with a friendly female than they would a large hairy bloke. Always a sucker for a social science experiment, I gamely took the job. One black eye and a wrenched shoulder later, I quit. What my boss and I hadn\u2019t fully appreciated is that by the time a person needs to be removed from a bar, his or her capacity to discriminate who is doing the removing has vanished. When the urge to fight erupts, any target will do.<\/p>\n

I shared this story with Fred Sharpe, a humpback whale researcher with the Alaska Whale Foundation, and he described the remarkable capacity humpback whales have to do just what those drunks could not\u2014hone their aggression. \u201cThe bulls love to fight. It\u2019s like Saturday night in the Octagon<\/a>,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019ll be in a whale watch boat and all these males will be thrashing on each other. They\u2019re bloodied and so charged up, and the fact that they don\u2019t redirect all that agitation towards the occupants of the boat is remarkable. With a lot of predators, if you got in the middle of that, it would be aimed at you in an instant. Humpbacks are these amazing Buddhist warriors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ascribing Buddhist-like qualities to humpbacks seems particularly apt in light of recent revelations about how these large baleen whales use their superpowers for good. Humpbacks, it turns out, deliberately interfere with attacking killer whales to help others in distress. They don\u2019t just defend their own babies or close relatives. They intervene on behalf of other species\u2014a gray whale calf with its mother, a seal hauled out on an ice floe, even an ocean sunfish. Humpbacks act to improve the welfare of others; the classic definition of altruism.<\/p>\n

First-person accounts of animals saving other animals are rare. Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, describes a pivotal encounter he witnessed in Antarctica in 2009. A group of killer whales washed a Weddell seal they were attacking off an ice floe. The seal swam frantically toward a pair of humpbacks that had inserted themselves into the action. One of the huge humpbacks rolled over on its back and the 180-kilogram seal was swept up onto its chest between the whale\u2019s massive flippers. When the killer whales moved in closer, the humpback arched its chest, lifting the seal out of the water. And when the seal started slipping off, the humpback, according to Pitman, \u201cgave the seal a gentle nudge with its flipper, back to the middle of its chest. Moments later, the seal scrambled off and swam to the safety of a nearby ice floe.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A Weddell seal takes refuge from attacking killer whales on the chest of a humpback whale. Photo by Robert L. Pitman<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThat incident convinced me on the spot,\u201d says Pitman. \u201cThose humpbacks were doing something that we couldn\u2019t explain with what we knew at the time about humpbacks and killer whales.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pitman started asking people to send him similar accounts. Soon he was poring through observations of 115 encounters between humpbacks and killer whales, recorded over 62 years. \u201cThere are some pretty astonishing videos these days of humpbacks charging in on killer whales,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

In a 2016 article in Marine Mammal Science<\/em>, Pitman and his coauthors describe this behavior and confirm that such acts of do-gooding are widespread. They have been occurring for a long time and have been seen in locations all over the world. \u201cNow that people know what to look for, especially people out on whale watch boats, they see it fairly regularly,\u201d Pitman says. \u201cSo now, even for the people who didn\u2019t believe, which initially included some of the coauthors on the paper, I think everybody now understands that this is going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

But knowing that something is happening and understanding why are two different things. Pitman and his coauthors openly ponder the meaning of these encounters. \u201cWhy,\u201d they write, \u201cwould humpback whales deliberately interfere with attacking killer whales, spending time and energy on a potentially injurious activity, especially when the killer whales were attacking other humpbacks that may not be related, or even more perplexingly, as in the majority of cases reported, when they were attacking other species of prey?\u201d<\/p>\n

Mammal-eating killer whales attack young humpbacks, so it\u2019s possible that humpbacks mob them as a generalized antipredator behavior, just as crows will mob a perched bald eagle. In 95 percent of the cases studied, the interactions were between humpbacks and mammal–<\/strong>eating killer whales. These include transient killer whales, also known as Bigg\u2019s killer whales<\/a>, that range along the west coast of North America hunting seals, sea lions, porpoises, dolphins, and the calves of larger whale species.<\/p>\n

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In Antarctica, a killer whale spyhops to check out a Weddell seal, while a humpback whale surfaces nearby. Photo by Kathryn Jeffs\/Minden Pictures<\/p><\/div>\n

It could also be that specific humpbacks, individuals that may have survived a killer whale attack when they were young or lost a calf to killer whale predation, respond to these traumas by going on the offensive. Sharpe concurs that the severity of a past interaction could affect an individual.<\/p>\n

A full-grown 23- to 36-tonne humpback presents a formidable force against a killer whale. Each enormous flipper can measure half the length of a telephone pole. Razor-sharp barnacles encrust the knobby leading edge of these appendages, and the whales brandish them with great dexterity. Humpbacks are the only species of baleen whales to carry their own offensive and defensive weaponry. Though killer whales have teeth, and are smaller and more agile, a blow from the massive humpback tail or flipper could be fatal.<\/p>\n

Killer whales recognize the danger. When confronted by a ferociously bellowing mob of adult humpbacks, killer whales will eventually flee. Humpbacks usually work in pairs to fend off killer whales, but lone humpbacks have been observed taking on 10 or more individuals. These battles can be hard won. Humpbacks sometimes spend hours mobbing killer whales, never stopping to rest and feed.<\/p>\n

Intriguingly, humpbacks don\u2019t just stumble upon killer whale attacks. They race toward them like firefighters into burning buildings. And like these brave rescue workers, humpbacks don\u2019t know who is in danger until they get there. That\u2019s because the sound that alerts them to an attack isn\u2019t the plaintive voice of the victim. It\u2019s the excited calls of the perpetrators.<\/p>\n

Transient killer whales tend to be silent when they are hunting, but when they finally attack they get really noisy. Pitman believes humpbacks have one simple instruction: \u201cWhen you hear killer whales attacking, go break it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

But humpbacks also display remarkable capacities for subtlety. Sharpe calls them \u201chypercultural beings,\u201d pointing out how adaptable and good they are at learning from each other. \u201cTheir ability to pick up on social nuance in some ways far surpasses ours,\u201d he says. When I ask if humpbacks are aware of the suffering of others\u2014one of the defining characteristics of compassion\u2014he shares a story of a humpback that died in Hawai\u2018i about a decade ago. \u201cThe whale was head down in the water no longer breathing. It attracted a lot of unusual interest from other humpbacks. You know how elephants fondle the bones and skulls of deceased individuals? Their response had that feel to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sharpe laments how difficult it is to test what\u2019s going on in the minds of whales. \u201cThere is part of the human brain that is associated with prosocial behavior,\u201d he explains. \u201cBut we are so limited because we can\u2019t put EEGs or PET scans on free-ranging larger whales.\u201d<\/p>\n

So are humpbacks compassionate? Scientists, Sharpe tells me, shy away from using the same descriptors we use for humans. \u201cWhat is exciting about humpbacks is that they are directing their behavior for the benefit of other species,\u201d he says. \u201cBut there\u2019s no doubt there are important differences between human compassion and animal compassion.\u201d When I pose the same question to Pitman he concurs. \u201cNo editor is going to let me use the word compassion. When a human protects an imperiled individual of another species, we call it compassion. If a humpback whale does so, we call it instinct. But sometimes the distinction isn\u2019t all that clear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Your browser does not support the video element.<\/p><\/video>\n

Humpback whales cruise British Columbia\u2019s central coast. Video by Grant Callegari<\/span><\/p>\n

We now recognize cultural differences within whale, primate, elephant, and other species in ways that were unimaginable just decades ago. Studies of animal emotions proliferate, and with them come challenging questions about how to best interpret what looks like compassion and altruism in other species. Just how these acts differ from our own behaviors may be hard to pinpoint. In 2014, commuters in a crowded railway station in northern India, for example, watched a male rhesus macaque attempt to resuscitate an unconscious macaque that had been electrocuted while walking on high-tension wires. A video of the incident<\/a> shows the rescuer nipping, massaging, shaking, and repeatedly plunging the victim into water. The life-saving effort lasts 20 minutes until the monkey miraculously revives.<\/p>\n

In an attempt to decipher what qualities of compassion might be uniquely human, I binge-watch videos on Stanford University\u2019s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education website<\/a>. I am captivated by a video<\/a> showing a series of experiments in which a toddler voluntarily totters across a room to assist an apparently clumsy researcher who needs help. The same basic helpful behavior happens later in the video when the experiment is repeated with chimpanzees.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s powerful about these studies, according to Felix Warneken, head of Harvard University\u2019s Social Cognitive Development Group and the researcher who led the study, is that they challenge the strongly held belief that we need to be taught to be altruistic through social norms. His findings indicate otherwise. Chimpanzees, as well as children too young to have learned the rules of politeness, spontaneously engage in helpful behaviors, even when they have to stop playing or overcome obstacles to do so. The same results have been duplicated with children in Canada, India, and Peru, as well as with chimpanzees at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and other research centers across the world. The chimps helped not only people they knew, but human strangers too.<\/p>\n

Compassion, it turns out, is innate. Human beings and other animals have what Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, calls a \u201ccompassionate instinct.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steve Cole, a professor of medicine and psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences in the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine reveals an intriguing insight into threat biology that might shed further light on why humpbacks willingly enter into dangerous altercations with killer whales. Cole explains that scientists used to think that the circuitry for detecting and responding physiologically to threatening circumstances was there to protect the survival of the individual. But that is no longer the case. Studies in threat neurobiology suggest that those circuits are there to defend the things individuals care about. \u201cThis is why you get parents and those firefighters running into burning buildings to save children and soldiers running into a hail of gunfire for the country they love,\u201d says Cole. \u201cThese people are in adverse environments, but they are acting as if they are in good environments simply because they are attached to some kind of big purpose or cause greater than their own individual well-being or perhaps sometimes, even survival.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>

A female gray whale lifts her calf out of the water to protect it from a hunting killer whale. Photo by Sue Flood\/Minden Pictures<\/p><\/div>\n

I wonder what humpback whales care deeply enough about to actively swim into battle with killer whales. When I pose this to Pitman, he tells me they are selfish. \u201cThey are getting something out of this.\u201d He believes that the fact that they occasionally save a humpback calf is a strong enough motive for them to rush in to help, even if it means they end up saving sunfish and sea lions and dolphins and a gray whale calf every now and then. \u201cIt\u2019s the net effect that is working for them,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

All altruism involves some benefit for the helper, Cole agrees. He says it\u2019s biologically difficult to call anything \u201ctrue altruism\u201d because \u201chelping others almost always doses us with some kind of dopaminergic reward. From the standpoint of empirical biology, the notion of altruism may be a misnomer, if not outright illogical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, the happiness we derive when we act on behalf of the greater good shows up in our cells as a better immune response profile, according to Cole. While we might feel just as happy eating ice cream as we do volunteering at a beach cleanup, at a cellular level happiness derived from meaningful service to others is correlated with positive health benefits. Better health through environmental action\u2014that\u2019s good news indeed for engaging people in marine conservation.<\/p>\n

Sharpe says it\u2019s important to step back and appreciate the wonder of the act itself. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to get lost in the nuance and to come up with high standards of how you interpret this behavior,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the fact is you have seals on the bellies of humpbacks. You know, it\u2019s just a really cool phenomenon and that\u2019s reason enough.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why humpback whales rescue seals and why volunteering for beach cleanups improves your health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":12979,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"acf":{"hero_video_url":null,"hero_video_caption":"","deck":"Why humpback whales rescue seals and why volunteering for beach cleanups improves your health.","authors_group":[{"by_group":"by","contributors_group":[15515]}],"word_count_override":"","podbean1":"g69wvb\/The_Power_Of_Compassion.mp3","podbean2":"cffj3-6f15b2","redirect":"","geolocation":null,"related":[16209,16915],"twitterimage":19682,"facebookimage":19274,"twitterdescription":"","edited":[17606],"factchecked":[18501],"code":"","no_old_story_flag":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16125"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/custom_features"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39915,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16125\/revisions\/39915"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiles\/18501"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiles\/17606"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/16915"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16209"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}