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Guest post by Sabine Carey, Marcela Ibáñez, and Eline Drury Løvlien
On April 10, 1998, various political parties in Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and the Republic of Ireland signed a peace deal ending decades of violent conflict. Twenty-five years later, the Good Friday Agreement remains an example of complex but successful peace negotiations that ended the conflict era known as The Troubles.
Since the agreement, Northern Ireland has experienced a sharp decline in violence. But sectarian divisions continue as a constant feature in everyday life. Peace walls remain in many cities, separating predominantly Catholic nationalists from predominantly Protestant unionist and loyalist neighborhoods. Brexit and the Northern Ireland protocol increased tensions between the previously warring communities, leading to an upsurge in sectarian violence, which has been a great cause of concern.
In March 2022, we conducted an online survey to understand attitudes toward sectarianism among Northern Ireland’s adult population. Our results show that sectarianism continues to impact perceptions and attitudes in Northern Ireland. The continued presence of paramilitaries is still a divisive issue that follows not just sectarian lines but also has a strong gender component.
Our findings show that the pattern of who identifies as Unionist or Nationalist closely resembles the patterns of who reports having a Protestant or Catholic background. Unionists prefer a closer political union with Great Britain and are predominantly Protestant, Nationalists are overwhelmingly Catholic and are in favor of joining the Republic of Ireland.
Catholic and Nationalist identities appear to have a greater salience for the post-agreement generations than for older generations who lived through the Troubles. For Protestant and Unionist respondents, the opposite is the case, as religious background and community affiliation have a higher salience among older groups, particularly among men. Among the adults we surveyed, for men the modal age of those identifying as Unionists is 58 years, for women it is 46.
When asked about the greatest problem facing Northern Ireland today, sectarianism still features strongly among both communities. Today, the fault lines of the conflict seem to resonate more with those from a Catholic background than with those from a Protestant background. While Protestants were predominantly concerned with poverty and crime, among Catholics sectarianism emerged most often as the greatest concern. Just over 50 percent of Catholic respondents mentioned an aspect relating to the Troubles (sectarianism or paramilitaries) as the greatest problem today, compared to only 39 percent of Protestant respondents. Most Protestant respondents selected Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol as the greatest problem, reflecting concerns of the Protestant community discussed in a Political Violence At A Glance post from 2021.
To what extent does economic status drive concerns? Those who see themselves as belonging to a lower-income group were more likely to identify poverty and unemployment as the greatest problem. Concerns about sectarianism and (former) paramilitary groups appeared most prevalent among those who placed themselves in the high-income group.
The continued presence of Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries is a noticeable feature in post-conflict Northern Ireland. While they are predominantly associated with violence and crime, some view them as a source of security and stability. While our findings show that concerns about paramilitaries were more prevalent among high-income earners, the perception of paramilitaries has a significant gender component. Nearly 50 percent of male Catholic respondents attributed a controlling influence to paramilitaries in their area. And while most of them saw these groups as a source of fear and intimidation, 32 percent agreed that the paramilitaries kept their local area safe. But only 5 percent of female Catholic respondents felt similarly. This difference is not as stark between female and male Protestant respondents. Both groups were substantially less likely than male Catholics to consider paramilitary groups as a source of safety.
Different perceptions of armed groups by gender are not unique to Northern Ireland. A 2014 study on Colombia found significant differences between female and male perceptions of post-conflict politics and participation. Although there were no substantial gender differences in the overall support for the peace process in Colombia, female respondents reported higher levels of distrust and skepticism toward demobilization, forgiveness, and reconciliation and higher disapproval of the political participation of former FARC members. The effect was even greater for mothers and women victimized during the conflict.
Violent attacks have dampened the anniversary celebration of the peace agreement and 25 years of relative stability. The recent injury of a police detective by an IRA splinter group, reports of paramilitary-style attacks and the use of petrol bombs against the police, coupled with turf battles between Ulster factions are continuous reminders of the presence and power that paramilitary organizations still hold across Northern Ireland. Even today, communities are kept under siege through violence and ransom. The formal termination of violent conflicts through peace agreements, as in the case of the Good Friday Agreement and other prominent examples such as the 2016 Colombian Peace Accord, does not automatically imply the disbandment of armed organizations. The impact of the presence of (former) armed groups in people’s daily lives continues to be high in most post-conflict contexts.
Findings from surveys in other post-conflict environments mirror this long shadow of war. A study of Croat and Serbian youths showed the continued impact of the Yugoslav Wars on ethnic group identities and how continued communal segregation impacts inter-group ethnic attitudes towards out-groups. A recent study finds that a decade after the civil war in Sri Lanka people from previously warring sides have very different views of peace and security. Respondents who belong to the defeated minority ethnic group, the Tamils, provided a more negative assessment of security and ethnic relations than those from the victorious majority, the Sinhalese. They also reported seeing irregular armed groups in a more protective role rather than a threatening one, when they encountered them, as we show here. And in many post-war countries, it’s the police who threaten peace, as discussed in this post. A study on Liberia found that experiences during the war continued to impact perceptions of the police afterwards. Victims of rebel violence were later more trusting of the police, while victims of state-perpetrated violence were not.
Much research is rightly concerned about how to avoid the conflict trap. Yet even countries that avoid falling back into full-scale civil war oftentimes do not offer adequate security and peace for all groups of their civilian population. Continued vigilance of unequal experiences and perceptions of security are necessary to work towards meaningful and lasting peace.
Sabine C. Carey is Professor of Political Science at University of Mannheim. Marcela Ibáñez is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Political Economy and Development at the University of Zurich. Eline Drury Løvlien is Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Teacher Education.
This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) via the Collaborative Research Center 884 “Political Economy of Reforms” at the University of Mannheim.
In February 2020, Laila Mickelwait, Exodus Cry’s Director of Abolition at the time, published an op-ed titled, “Time to Shut Pornhub Down,” bringing attention to the fact that Pornhub was hosting child pornography and videos of trafficking victims on the site. This sparked a petition and accompanying campaign, Traffickinghub. Then, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nicholas Kristof, published a scathing exposé in the New York Times, titled, “The Children of Pornhub,” leading the company to leap to action, deleting 80% of their content overnight — about 10 million videos. Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cut ties with the site. In 2021, Canadian parliament began to investigate the Canadian-based company that owns Pornhub, MindGeek and a number of lawsuits were filed against the company on behalf of survivors. NCOSE — the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation — filed several of these lawsuits, representing victims seeking justice against MindGeek. NCOSE was featured in a documentary released on Netflix last money, purporting to address the scandal, called Money Shot.
I spoke to Haley McNamara, Director of the International Centre on Sexual Exploitation in the UK and a Vice President at the U.S. based National Center on Sexual Exploitation, about the situation at Pornhub, the Netflix documentary, and NCOSE’s efforts to stop exploitation in porn.
The post Pornhub was hosting videos of minors and trafficking victims — what’s next? appeared first on Feminist Current.
Mourners cried during a candlelight vigil at Public Square Park in Nashville on March 29 honoring the victims of the shooting.
When I first came across Idra Novey’s Take What You Need, I was interested firstly by the title and, then, by the cover. There was something mysterious and inviting about the call to action paired with the pinks and blues of a sunset. Wandering into the novel, I took an immediate sense of comfort in the voices of our two protagonists, Leah and Jean. Both mothers, both artists, neither completely self-assured.
Take What You Need is a book about perspective. The narrative is shaped by the parallel lives of Jean—welder, artist, ex step-mother to Leah—and Leah—a wife and mother who has chosen to leave her past behind. Jean lives alone, erecting metal sculptures in her living room, battling the overt sense that her relationship with Leah refuses to ever be what it once was, and determined to reunite with her daughter. Jean seeks redemption in a relationship with the boy-next-door, a gangly kid named Elliot. Their neighborhood provides the landscape for the novel, weaving the overwhelming sense of displacement provoked by class and cultural conflict into the relationship between two women divided by a critical moment in the past. We begin our story in medias res: Jean has died and willed her sculptures to Leah who makes her skeptical journey homeward.
When reading Novey’s writing, you are likely to forget that what transpires on the page is not in fact transpiring in reality. I looked up occasionally to glimpse a hand-wrought sculpture by Jean and was met with the whiteness of my wall. Similarly, having recently become familiar with the Southern landscape myself, I could easily imagine the roads and the gas stations, the natural scenery that made me let out a long breath and the neighborhoods that could make me hold the next in tightly, wanting to call the least amount of attention to myself. Novey straddles the fine line between depicting the world we live in and finely illustrating her own.
Novey is the writer of six additional books, three of which are poetry collections including, Exit, Civilian, chosen for 2011 National Poetry Series. She is a recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and Poets & Writers Magazine, among others.
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The Rumpus: Let’s talk first about how much research went into this novel. It’s heavily laced with references to artists—specifically sculptors. How much of your personal knowledge were you bringing to the page versus how much research did you have to do, and what was that process like for you?
Idra Novey: I learned to weld boxes in order to get a lived sense of Jean’s choices as an artist. Over several years, I welded boxes with various metal artists, Julia Murray, Norm Ed, and also with Dan Denville at the Center for Metal Arts in Pennsylvania. I visited various scrap yards to get metal for the boxes, including the Novey scrap yard that has been passed down among the men in my maternal family for over a century. I have no material connection to the Novey century in recycling but I feel a strong connection artistically to my namesake, Ida Novey, who started the scrapyard in 1906.
Louise Bourgeois entered the novel after I found a beat-up book of her writing at Bull Creek, the flea market that Jean goes to in the novel. Bourgeois’s insights on sexuality and power, on her father, aligned potently with how I imagined Jean’s artistic drive. Bourgeois recognized the libidinal forces that compelled her to keep experimenting and taking new risks with her art. Agnes Martin’s writing aligned with Jean’s process in other aspects. Martin, like Jean, felt a strong need to retreat and work in complete solitude.
While writing Jean’s chapters, I immersed myself in the writing of Anne Truitt, Celia Paul, Hilma af Klint, and many other women artists, too. They were all repeatedly dismissed and written off, and yet somehow still found the conviction to keep taking their art seriously. One of the most deeply joyful and rewarding processes of my writing life has been figuring out how to convey Jean’s nerve, creating the scenes with her on the ladder, stacking her Manglements [sculptures] as high as the ceiling of her living room allowed.
Rumpus: There are two female protagonists presented in your novel. We meet Leah first. The stepdaughter/mother relationship is a very specific breed entirely its own and is often only understood by those engaged in it. We learn that Jean abandons Leah at ten-years-old. Why does Jean choose not to leave a note? Is the burden of abandonment what compels Jean to become so fixated by Elliot (her next-door neighbor turned pseudo-mentee)?
Novey: I agree the stepdaughter/mother relationship is a specific dynamic that people frequently misunderstand who haven’t experienced it. I’m close to both my stepmother and my mother and talk to them both often. I haven’t come across many novels about adult women relating to their stepmothers, and as so often happens, I ended up writing the scenes I longed to read and couldn’t find.
What happens to Jean when she leaves Leah’s father, the loss Jean has to assume of her role as Leah’s stepmother, is a loss I’ve seen a number of women consider, and take. Whether the stepdaughter/mother relationship will last is never certain, and in Leah’s case, at ten years old, she’s beholden to the good will of her father. I’d like to leave it up to readers to intuit why Jean doesn’t leave a note for Leah. Your insight is quite astute about Jean bringing some of her truncated experience of mothering to her relationship with Elliott, and yet she also brings to Elliott her truncated experience of marriage and sexual self. All that messy chemistry is there at once.
Rumpus: Jean is an artist through and through and driven by the compulsion she feels to weld with a freedom her father never allowed himself to have. How does Jean parse the freedom she finds in art with the ever-growing complexity of the world around her?
Novey: I think this is the driving question of the novel, how any of us make art given the ever-growing contradictions of the world around us, and also the complex past we inherit. The epigraph from Louise Bourgeois at the start of the novel addresses this question head on, and how art in itself can be a way to answer it, as it was for me, through the process of writing this novel: Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.
Rumpus: We get a sense of the current political fever within the first few pages of the book, however it’s evasive—Leah sees flags while driving through town, multiple people garbed in camo, a red hat on a woman’s head. Why did you choose to keep these things unnamed until the end of the book? The environment gives you the sense that this could be a town anywhere at any point in time: a town divided by those who are diverse and those who fight against diversity instead of for it.
Novey: In early drafts, I was ambivalent about how explicit to be about the slogans on the signs and flags. The deeper I got into the novel, though, the less necessary it seemed to name the slogans. I’m glad to hear it evoked to you a time of political polarization that transcended our particular moment. That was my hope and any reader living now will know what the signs and slogans say. Leaving the words unnamed added that timeless quality you described, and the novel is a fairy tale—as I suspect any novel attempting to dissolve even the smallest aspect of our current cultural divides, is a fairy tale.
Rumpus: Elliot is a character who got under my skin. He consistently demonstrates a quiet, but seething undertone: a man caught inside his own head, young only in age. I got infuriated with him a few times wanting him to do the right thing instead of being a passive bystander. Why did you make Elliot such a quiet character?
Novey: I heard Jennifer Egan speak once about attempting to take a new kind of risk with each work of fiction, and part of that risk-taking is creating a character who subverts stereotypes in a way she hasn’t written about before. With Elliott’s character, I wanted to subvert prevailing stereotypes about young rural men, who are often portrayed in reductive, demeaning caricatures. It isn’t in Elliott’s nature to be confrontational, and when he does finally speak up, he gets kicked in the face.
In all three of my novels, I’ve been drawn to write about power imbalances and how often people make choices based on the likelihood of retaliation. What causes people to resign themselves to inaction is a question that really fascinates me. Sevlick, the town in the novel, is an amalgam of various towns in the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia where I grew up, and where parts of my family have lived for over a hundred years. I’ve known many quiet young men like Elliott, who have limited options and who work in situations where they don’t have the luxury of being able to speak their minds.
Rumpus: Take What You Need—the title felt illuminated by the end of my first reading. I read it as a plea—take what you need, but leave the rest (an oft-repeated quote in twelve-step rooms)—but also a reminder that the world will take, leaving very little for those who need it most.
Novey: It’s wondrous to hear you read the title as a plea. Over many drafts, I came to think of it as a plea as well, although my original reason for choosing it was the biblical proverb about binging on honey: If you find honey, eat just what you need, lest you have too much and vomit it up. We are a species prone to indulgences. When we find honey, it’s hard to resist taking just what we need, even knowing the likelihood that a lack of self-control will leave us hunched over, hurling, and feeling ill. In the beginning of the novel, when Jean tells Elliott’s mother to draw as much water from the spigot as they need, they both know there will be implications to this offer. It is about far more than just water.
Rumpus: The sculptures that Jean erected in her living room shrouds the story that is told by the two women, interlaced by both Jean’s favorite artists’ quotes and the fairy tales Jean told Leah and that Leah now interprets as an adult. Are the sculptures extensions of Jean herself? Dreams coerced in metal, balanced between found objects, and haphazardly perfected?
Novey: Thank you, that is a beautiful way to describe Jean’s sculptures, and the allure of art for many people, to coerce their dreams into forms that can be experienced in waking life. When art lacks that haphazard pursuit you describe, it feels overdetermined, a cultural “project” rather than an artwork that involved moral risk and getting uneasy and uncertain, following all sorts of murky impulses that lead to failure and maybe, after various years, to something worth sharing with others.
Rumpus: Storytelling is an ancient art, sharing stories to recall those things—events, adventures, people—passed down throughout the ages. What is Leah’s fascination with turning her relationship with Jean into a fairy tale?
Novey: The allure of revisiting a fairy tale, the writer Helen Oyeyemi says, is to shift “time and location, and see what holds true, and why or why not.” I wanted to revisit all the depictions we’ve passed down about stepmothers, about Appalachia, about women artists and rural artists. What doesn’t hold true and why those depictions have endured were questions that took on new light when viewed through fairy tales.
Rumpus: Can all of the characters in your novel be assigned a character in folklore? How deep do the ancient roots run in the town of Sevlick?
Novey: Sevlick is an invented town and only exists in my imagination. It’s an amalgam of various Allegheny Mountain towns in the area where I grew up. The characters in the novel are composites of people I interviewed over many years. I listened to their voices every day before working on the novel to keep the vibrancy and singularity of each character present in each scene.
Rumpus: One of my favorite parts of your book was your ending. I don’t want to spoil it for any readers, so all I will say is that it presents the idea of “what could” in an alluring enough way to believe the truth of “what is.” How do we differentiate between the two in art? In building characters from the ground up and a book from the pages?
Novey: Belief is a shifting, fluid endeavor. I found it quite daunting to sit down each day and write about cultural divides and familial estrangement. It’s a painful subject and my sense of “what is” kept changing depending on which character’s perspective I was inhabiting. This novel challenged me in ways that felt different from the novels and books of poetry and translation that came before it. I couldn’t have written this novel without living through other books first. Until I reached the middle of my life, I wasn’t quite ready to listen—with a genuinely open mind—to artists in the region I left about what compelled them to stay.
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Author photo by Jesse Ditmar
A new study published in the journal Nature Communications Biology suggests that whale songs may actually just be nature's emo croon. Using an 18-year dataset of humpback whale behavior, the researchers noticed that whale song had become an increasingly less successful mating tactic for the male humps as populations have recovered from the height whaling. — Read the rest
Male whales along Australia’s eastern seaboard are giving up singing to attract a mate, switching instead to fighting their male competition.
Researchers analyzed almost two decades of data on humpback whale behavior and found singing may no longer be in vogue when it comes to seduction.
“…humans aren’t the only ones subject to big social changes when it comes to mating rituals.”
“In 1997, a singing male whale was almost twice as likely to be seen trying to breed with a female when compared to a non-singing male,” says Rebecca Dunlop, associate professor at the University of Queensland’s School of Biological Sciences.
“But by 2015 it had flipped, with non-singing males almost five times more likely to be recorded trying to breed than singing males. It’s quite a big change in behavior so humans aren’t the only ones subject to big social changes when it comes to mating rituals.”
The researchers believe the change has happened progressively as populations recovered after the widespread cessation of whaling in the 1960s.
“If competition is fierce, the last thing the male wants to do is advertise that there is a female in the area, because it might attract other males which could out-compete the singer for the female,” Dunlop says.
“By switching to non-singing behavior, males may be less likely to attract competition and more likely to keep the female. If other males do find them, then they either compete, or leave.
“With humpbacks, physical aggression tends to express itself as ramming, charging, and trying to head slap each other. This runs the risk of physical injury, so males must weigh up the costs and benefits of each tactic.”
“Male whales were less likely to sing when in the presence of other males. Singing was the dominant mating tactic in 1997, but within the space of seven years this has turned around,” she says.
“It will be fascinating to see how whale mating behavior continues to be shaped in the future.”
Celine Frere, an associate professor and study coauthor, says previous work from Professor Michael Noad found the whale population grew from approximately 3,700 whales to 27,000 between 1997 and 2015.
“We used this rich dataset, collected off Queensland’s Peregian Beach, to explore how this big change in whale social dynamics could lead to changes in their mating behavior,” Frere says.
“We tested the hypothesis that whales may be less likely to use singing as a mating tactic when the population size is larger, to avoid attracting other males to their potential mate.”
The research appears in Communications Biology.
Source: University of Queensland
The post To woo a mate, male whales choose fighting over singing appeared first on Futurity.
As January draws to a close, our favorite stories this week included a stirring critical essay, a paean to the world’s greatest boxed meal, a rethinking of psychedelics’ impact on the planet, a profile of a craftsperson at his peak, and an eye-opener about how humpback whales use air in some unexpected ways.
Ken Chen | n+1 | 11,542 words | January 25, 2023
After Corky Lee passed last year, the photographer and community organizer was memorialized in his hometown’s most conventionally prestigious outlets: The Times offered a sizable obituary, as did Hua Hsu in The New Yorker. This week, on the first anniversary of Lee’s death, Ken Chen rendered an altogether different kind of portrait in n+1. Much of the same biographical information is included, as are a number of Lee’s iconic photographs of Asian Americans in New York throughout the last six decades. Yet, when Chen writes about his encounters with Lee, and about the 14 photographs he selects to represent Lee’s work, the grief that suffuses his words isn’t solely about Lee, but about the many atrocities visited upon the Asian American community, up to and after Lee’s death. Chen’s critical acumen here is reason enough to read: “His images lack a charismatic subject,” he writes of Lee. “Those whom capital dismissed as surplus, he saw as beautiful. He commemorated the multitude, the striking waiters and seamstresses whose unruly abundance crowded away any beatific composition.” But he brings a similar understated poetry to the social conditions Lee’s work served to illuminate — and with violence against Asian American elders and others seemingly unending (including a horrifying recent attack in my own hometown), that juxtaposition makes Chen’s piece nearly as indelible as the images it contains. —PR
Ivana Rihter | Catapult | January 19, 2023 | 2,261 words
I only discovered Kraft dinners later in life after moving to North America revealed the cult of Kraft to me. A stable lurking in every cupboard; I admired the respect that something so impossibly orange had managed to garner. When Ivana Rihter finds KDs, though, they are much more; cooked for her by her baba, they are inextricably linked to her immigration story. She describes the process of boiling the pasta and adding the sauce with reverence, the memory mixed in with her love for her baba and appreciation for the economic hardships her family struggled through to start their new life. Her baba teaches her to put feta on top, and with this “secret little piece of the home country mixed in with all-American shelf-stable cheese” it remains a food for life, and — consistently sitting at about a dollar a box — one that carries on seeing her through hard times. I found this an unexpectedly beautiful essay, more about memory and belonging than cheesy pasta. Food can transport you back in time, especially if, as Rihter describes it, it “is soaked with memories of [an] origin story.” —CW
Amber X. Chen | Atmos | January 16, 2023 | 3,196 words
In this piece, Chen explores what the current psychedelic renaissance means for environmental activism, and how synthetic drugs like LSD and MDMA and psychoactive plants like ayahuasca and peyote can stir change within individuals — and ultimately galvanize social movements. This all sounds incredibly positive on the surface, but not everyone who dabbles in such mind-altering journeys is transformed for the better; psychedelics also fuel right-wing movements, too. (See: “QAnon Shaman.“) The decriminalization of psychedelics is a step toward making their therapeutic benefits accessible to more people, yes, but as Chen notes, it increases the threat of deforestation, and — with today’s psychedelic movement being largely white — it also takes power away from Indigenous people, who have harnessed the healing power of these sacred plants for thousands of years. (See also a Top 5 essay I picked last year: “The Gentrification of Consciousness.”) I appreciate Chen’s exploration here, and the questions posed that I haven’t stopped thinking about, like: “How broken is Western society that we think we need drugs in order to facilitate mass climate action?” —CLR
Elly Fishman | Chicago Magazine | January 17, 2023 | 4,177 words
Recently, in his late 60s, my dad decided to learn how to play the violin. I respect the choice to try the impossible, especially something as delicate and timeless as bowing a stringed instrument. (My parents’ cats, who endure the scratching out of notes from beneath the couch or bed, seem to have a different opinion.) After reading this lovely profile, I think perhaps my dad, a skilled carpenter, should also try apprenticing as a luthier. I, someone with zero skills at playing an instrument besides an egg shaker, who curses putting IKEA furniture together, was mesmerized by the descriptions of how John Becker, perhaps the best violin restorer on earth, practices his craft. Elly Fishman’s profile has a musical quality: It sweeps readers through chapters of Becker’s personal story and dwells in long, lyrical moments when, with the surest of hands, Becker repairs some of the most revered instruments on the planet — namely, Stradivari. There are just 650 of the violins left. What makes them so extraordinary? Musicians and scientists may puzzle over that question forever. In the meantime, Becker works — quietly, meticulously, instinctively. “We are caretakers of these instruments,” one of his clients tells him. “We move on, but these instruments continue to the next generation.” —SD
Doug Perrine | Hakai Magazine | December 20, 2022 | 1,500 words
It’s well known that many animals use tools to aid feeding and other tasks of life. Think: otters floating on their backs, cracking shells with rocks. You’d think it would be hard for whales to use tools, but as Doug Perrine reports at Hakai Magazine, humpbacks use what’s available to them — air and water — to form bubbles for a variety of activities. “I’m tempted to describe the air in a humpback’s lungs as a Swiss army knife because I’ve seen whales do so many different things with it,” he wrote. “It is not actually a tool collection though, but a storehouse of raw construction material with which the whale can fashion a variety of tools. Lacking free fingers and opposable thumbs, whales are unable to create and use tools in the same way as humans, but reveal their intelligence through the manner in which they utilize other body parts for tool production and use.” —KS
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Humpback whales use bubbles to screen their young, corral prey, and ward off aggressors, among other things. But do they have special bubble signatures used only when humans are present?
This young female whale approached my boat, then dove and began “drawing” with bubble curtains released in a thin stream from her blowhole. There was no food around and no other whales in sight. She rolled to one side so that she could look upward to admire her handiwork. Was she practicing making bubble structures that could be useful tools on the feeding grounds, or was she just enjoying the visual beauty of the scintillating bubble spirals? Was it art for art’s sake? Certainly, other animals, including captive dolphins, sea lions, rhinos, and elephants have learned to paint with brushes, and both wild bowerbirds and pufferfish produce visual art to impress potential mates.
FreshRSS 