that post you reblogged about the origins of “swim free swim forever” got me fascinated by how cetacean zoanthropes on here seem to have more cohesive/active of a collective + culture of sorts, at least compared to *what i’ve personally seen* of other zoanthropes trying to pack together by species groups.
do you feel like you’ve observed the same difference too? i wonder if it’s just my own sampling bias, or if it has something to do with cetaceans naturally bonding thru complex social behavior, being way more on the “lingual” side of the nonlingual-to-lingual spectrum (compared to other nonhuman animals), and/or needing more support to manage the jump between the cetacean world and human world—vs the jump between, say, the canine world and the human world?
Ahoj! My apologies it has been 3,5 months since you sent in this ask. I did get to it eventually (poor talankii has one I have been meaning to get to... for 14 months).
I have definately noticed that we have, or really had a more cohesive culture. I do not think it is actually necessarily an effect of whale or cetacean biology or social structure, at least not fully or directly.
I think it is in part that I reached out to others when I met them, especially dune (and later sonar) and sigrún because of a very strong desire and know and meet others like me, and we would write back and forth in messages. Between the members of the pod they still felt close together and each other as podmates , but at least it did not sound like they had really talked. I think that we were writing back and forth made it so we all kept coming back to tumblr every few days which prompted us to post more.
I think the other thing that made a large difference, especially at the start is that there were really very few cetaceans. There were some here when I started posting again, but otherwise I had only interacted with maybe two cetaceans in the previous decade. For myself I also really started this blog and this iteration of having tumblr again to document the whalesuit project and idea of returning to the water so I came in with a pretty clear goal, and I imagine for the others a pretty compelling goal.
I think the first two things explains to cohesiveness among much of the zoanthropes, but for a while that cohesiveness extended across quite a bit of cetaceans, especially during that period many were exploring cetacean identity. This three of us were then interacting with these aligned very specific experiences and very specific goals. As new people would explore the idea of being a cetacean, most of what they would encounter would be our three experiences all more or less unified, and so like a new calf learning about their pod and culture, we became very much the template for how one exists as a cetacean as well as the various goals and aesthetics (and there will inevitably be some crossover because of common species experiences and a variety of self selection biases). Each species really has various aesthetics attached to it, be that wolves, or coyotes, or horses, etc. I think whales exist in their wierd area where there were both very few aesthetics or motifs attached to whales except maybe things like marine park shows, and so our shared experiences became sort of a building point for many people.
Admittedly basically all of those things could be part of the social structure - my desperate desire to connect to others (which does inform a lot of what and how I post here) and new and exploring whales learning much like calves do.
That being said, as time has gone on, and in part sigrún has gone and sonar and I have been less consistant in posting due to our own struggles, there are starting to be greater diversity within our little subcommunity and another pod, formed mostly around talankii and the orca factkind have themselves their own unique culture, understanding, and aesthetics. I think over time, the cohesiveness of the cetacean spaces will decrease across a wider variety of experiences. I do hope that cetaceans will still form up into our little pods of similar experience, but I am curious how the community will evolve in time. I think it is quite neat of the two "major pods" that exist, there is already variation between us.
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