A pod in the strait of Gibraltar has sunk three boats and damaged dozens of others, and their story has captivated the world. What explains this unprecedented behaviour?
hat’s going on with the #orcauprising? You’ve probably gathered the basics: 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. Last month, the first instance of this behaviour was recorded in another place, when an orca rammed a boat near Shetland. “What I felt [was] most frightening was the very loud breathing of the animal,” said the Dutch yachtsman targeted, Dr Wim Rutten, who had been fishing for mackerel. “Maybe he just wanted to play. Or look me in the eyes. Or to get rid of the fishing line.”
There are two fascinating things about this. First, of course, what are the orcas doing? But the second is about another species entirely: us. Why do we like this story so much? Because we do: people – including me – love the idea of orcas attacking boats. Browsing through orca memes, there’s an orca as the sickle in the hammer and sickle, with the headline “eat the rich”, and a Soviet-style graphic of a heroic orca emerging under a super-yacht. “What if we kissed while watching the orcas take back the ocean,” reads one tweet with 1m views, while a much-used image of an arm holding a microphone up to a captive orca has been repurposed endlessly to highly entertaining effect – I like one where it’s “singing” a bespoke version of the Meredith Brooks classic: “I’m a bitch / I’m an orca / Sinking yachts /Just off Majorca [sic] / I’m a sinner I’m a whale / Imma hit you with my tail.” We’re taking great pleasure in projecting extremely human narratives and motivations on orcas. But how wrong is that, and why does it appeal?
The first question is easier to answer, or rather not to answer: 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.” Even if we’re in the conscious incompetence phase of learning about orca behaviour, there are expert theories.
