Revolting Orcas
Recent accounts of “attacks” on vessels by orcas off the Iberian peninsula are challenging the way we expect the natural world to behave. Increasing in number since 2020, from northern Portugal to the strait of Gibraltar, in one of the most extreme events in May of this year, orcas sank a yacht.
One very human-coloured notion is the idea that orcas aren’t just taking back the ocean but are somehow fomenting a revolution #orcauprising? So are orcas are “attacking” yachts. To be strictly factual, since 2020, a small pod of orcas in the strait of Gibraltar has been interacting with sailing boats in a new way: ramming vessels, pressing their bodies and heads into the hulls and biting, even snapping off, the rudders. Over three years, more than 500 interactions have been recorded, three boats sunk and dozens of others damaged.
We have no idea if the Iberian orcas are expressing a struggle for survival as we deplete their food sources and pollute their environment, or just playing with us.
The answer is we don’t know what they’re doing or why. “What I think is most exciting about this is that actually, we don’t know at all,” says Tom Mustill, a biologist and film-maker, who wrote How to Speak Whale, after a humpback whale landed on his kayak (the jaw-dropping footage is on YouTube). “When we step outside our rush to project, it’s actually very reflective of where we’re at with cetacean sciences: we’re starting to understand that they’re so complicated and nuanced, and that individuals are very different from one another.”
“They’re tremendously powerful, incredibly intelligent, incredibly well organised; if that species wanted to do anything with us in the ocean, they could.” There are no reported instances of wild orcas killing people, but, says Mustill: “If killer whales wanted to start attacking people, disabling small vessels is a very strange way of going about that. They could just start eating swimmers all over the place.”
There are alternative theories. The fibreglass hulls of sailing boats might just feel nice – and orcas enjoy the sensory feedback: some Canadian pods seem to enjoy rubbing themselves on smooth rocks and pebbles; or it might just be a trend. A number of observed orca fads are not obviously examples of “adaptive” or useful behaviour – most famously the one for wearing salmon as hats. They’ve also mimicked sea lions, and some pods engage in greeting ceremonies. Social learning from each other is well documented in orca culture and, “culture” is how behavioural science describes it. “These are cultural beings,” says Barbara J King, professor emerita of anthropology at the College of William & Mary, Virginia, and author of Animals’ Best Friends. “The networks of individuals in orca societies, which are led by females, are highly attuned to each other’s behaviour, so traditions evolve over time that become, in some cases, cross-generational.”
But how about revenge, as many of the memes suggest? The Atlantic Orca Working Group 2021 report also suggested the interactions might be responding to individual orcas’ experiences: “A behaviour induced by an aversive incident, and therefore a precautionary behaviour.” Given a single “matriarch” orca, “White Gladis”, appears to have started these interactions, it has been suggested a prior injury or entanglement could have led her to act. Does that make it revenge? King doesn’t dismiss the idea. “If we’re talking about capacity, it’s not outside the realm of reasonable expectation and it would not necessarily be anthropomorphic,” she says, though, “I’m not suggesting this in support of an ‘uprising’ at all.” King has worked extensively on animal grief: her Ted talk on one orca, Tahlequah, who in 2018 carried her dead calf for 17 days and 1,000 miles, has had 3.5m views. “I don’t believe grief is a human emotion; I feel the same way about joy and sorrow. So what about revenge?” She points to narratives around elephants perpetrating destructive acts, which has also been presented as possible retribution for poor treatment. “Both orcas and elephants have the memory capacity and the intelligence to put these things together.”
Orcas, potentially have a clear sense of what humans have done to their environment. As demonstrated by the actions of White Gladis, orca society is matriarchal, and females can live to 100: “They will have a memory, almost a generational memory, of a time when the ocean was not dominated by human beings; when there were not seismic surveys, steam engines then diesel engines, military sonar … The most important thing for them is sound: there will be individual whales that remember when the sea was not that noisy.”
So they know what we’ve done and we know what we’ve done too, one of the reasons the #orcauprising resonates is our sense of collective guilt or, as Mustill puts it, “We feel like there’s something deeply unfair happening in the ocean.” From films such as Free Willy to Blackfish, we have become aware of how grotesque the idea of keeping captive orcas is, and we’re ever-more conscious of the degraded state of our seas. The pictures of the Iberian whales suggest they are in poor condition, with ribs showing, they’re skinny, a signifier of their massively impacted environment