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Do orcas' presence in the oceanic ecosystem benefit humans? It seems like they compete with us for seafood resources(probably mostly salmon, but I guess if you eat dolphin it'd be notable) and otherwise have relatively little effect on human interaction with the ecosystem. They're apex predators but I think most of the animals whose populations they keep in check are either things we eat or things with populations that don't need to be kept in check, either because they're sensitive to human activity(eg great white shark) or because they reproduce slowly(sea turtles, right whales).
I mean if an evil genie told me he'd kill either 10,000 water buffaloes or one human child, I'd have to ask if the deaths of those 10,000 water buffaloes would cause a famine in India or something. But orcas just seem like a bad example of that.
Probably.
The textbook example for ecological side effects is the wolf/deer thing. Kill wolves, deer population explodes, mass starvation, much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Or consider the Australian examples of creatures missing their natural predators. It’s not ironclad, but I would expect removing an apex predator to have consequences, and I would be awful skeptical of anyone who claimed to have a foolproof plan for them. Chesterton’s fence should probably apply.
The wolf/deer thing can be resolved by handing out more hunting licenses though, right? The Australian example is better, but more because humans are not those creatures' natural predators since we have nor reason to hunt them. Fish on the other hand--we can hunt a virtually infinite amount of fish. At least, our demand is easily elastic enough to compensate for the disappearance of all orcas.
I would be more concerned that their disappearance leads to an explosion of seals and other [non-apex] predators which would reduce the number of fish.
Humans have hunted seals and whales extensively in the past, though, so in theory we could just do it again to compensate.
Although this obviously isn't exhaustive, the wiki-walk I went through on Orcas showed that great white sharks(which are endangered) and certain larger whale species(which are also endangered) are the main species which don't have non-orca predators, and orca predation isn't a major factor in their populations because it is relatively rare, but that leopard seals and elephant seals are mostly controlled by orca predation even if they're occasionally picked off by larger sharks. So your scenario seems fairly plausible.
That's true, I'm sure sealing is lucrative enough.
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