Well that is concerning. My friend and I will be sailing there, on the way to Malta, in a few months. Wish me luck!
Scientific American thinks it’s an orca fad, like wearing a dead salmon for a hat.
This could be the next Tik-Tok challenge.
They’ve not killed anyone on the vessels they’ve sunk. That’s good.
My theory is that these are Spanish orcas applying terroristic pressure on the British colonial authorities in Gibraltar with unpredictable brazen attacks in local waters.
Oh, yeah, /s
Salmon Hats would be a great band name.
A variety of sea creatures like to wear hats.
Hats as a disguise or something sacrificial for predators to mistakenly take a bite from make a lot of sense.
For bottom dwelling critters, putting the disguise on their top surface makes sense; that’s where predators approach from. Hence hats, not shoes. For a fuzzy thing like that crab or for a nearly sessile creature like an urchin I could see how a hat could be retained mechanically as the animal slowly moves about.
But orcas have rather smooth skin and move fast through the water. How the heck did they get the dead salmon to stay on their heads? The Scientific American article had no info and Googling seemed to turn up lots of popular articles repeating other popular articles and accompanied by random file photos of orcas.
Sure, it’s all fun and games having a boat race, but the orcas want to play too…
How long until they decide that boats are just food cartons?
Coming soon: antivaxers decide that Covid vaccine spike proteins shed into the ocean are driving the orcas to violence.*
*and probably sank the Titanic submersible too!
I wonder when some irate or frightened fishermen will begin trying to kill them.
Fishermen been unnecessarily killing sharks for centuries now. What makes you think they’re not doing that to orcas now, at least in the few areas orcas are common?
Another yacht goes under!
If it’s a fad, it has spread 2000 miles north:
(Or a Spanish orca went for a wander, ofc)
Interesting, I keep up with people who swim the Straights of Gibraltar and I don’t remember hearing any coming across any orcas. I wonder if part of it is because the weather, currents, and temps have been “better” this year as there have been more crossings by swimmers this year than in most years.
I wonder if perhaps there’s something different about boating equipment these days.
All commercial or recreational fishing boats have “fish finders”, specialized downward aiming sonars that can spot not only the seafloor, but schooling fish.
Have perhaps in the last few years a new generation of these things been developed that operate on different frequencies or are much louder, or softer, than prior inventions? Or use a new waveform? Modern digital signal processing has a lot of voodoo and darn near anything could be possible.
Anyhow, if more and more boats are emitting more and more of a particularly “nails on chalkboard” sound in the orcas’ perception, they might be attacking not boats, but sound sources.
This is a wild guess retrieved directly from my rump, but maybe an interesting guess to somebody.
It is plausible, but we’d have to see evidence of this worldwide and not just in one or two places. Unless there is something similar about each case. Perhaps there is something about the boats in the Straight themselves - I mean, maybe the Orca are tired of hearing crews singing Spanish Ladies.
Per the Live Science article above, the experts studying it suspect it started with one traumatized female and has spread.
“The orcas are doing this on purpose, of course, we don’t know the origin or the motivation, but defensive behavior based on trauma, as the origin of all this, gains more strength for us every day,” López Fernandez said.
Experts suspect that a female orca they call White Gladis suffered a “critical moment of agony” — a collision with a boat or entrapment during illegal fishing — that flipped a behavioral switch. “That traumatized orca is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat,” López Fernandez said.
Orcas are social creatures that can easily learn and reproduce behaviors performed by others, according to the 2022 study. In the majority of reported cases, orcas have made a beeline for a boat’s rudder and either bitten, bent or broken it.
“We do not interpret that the orcas are teaching the young, although the behavior has spread to the young vertically, simply by imitation, and later horizontally among them, because they consider it something important in their lives,” López Fernandez said.
I think it’s just a phase they’re going through. Once they develop some other interests they’ll get over it. Perhaps get them involved in organized sports to burn off some of that extra energy.
Cool. Makes total sense within a local group of orcas. And since they are migrating critters, “local” means wherever the pod is now, not necessarily in the Straits of Gibraltar.
But if this behavior is springing up in geographically isolated groups that do not plausibly interact, what then should we think? I believe that these remote occurrences are really happening too, although I’m in no position to debate someone who’s actually actively studying this stuff professionally.
It’d also be interesting to plot the season and frequency of occurrences versus the seasonal spatial density of orcas. Do we have a hotspot of attacks due to lots of boats, lots of orcas, or just an especially hostile local pod? Making no moral judgment here; orcas as a species have certainly earned the right to be pissed at humans as a species.