18 ms·

Orcas striking sailing boats in the Straits of Gibraltar

290 points by oska 6y ago

darksaints 6y ago
Crazy, this popped up in my YouTube subscriptions two days ago. https://youtu.be/pgPfkqQcIZs https://youtu.be/pgPfkqQcIZs They do seem to know what they're doing by going after rudders and keels. And they seem to take off when they have accomplished their objective.
echelon 6y ago
The "stressed" angle is interesting, and I appreciate it since these are experts discussing the matter. I wonder, however, if there is something more sinister at play. Orcas are very intelligent animals. Is there a chance that they knocked a lone sailor off of a boat once and found a new food source? What if they're trying to replicate previous success? The entire pod could have learned this behavior. Orcas are known to eat large terrestrial mammals. The fact that we don't have a documented case of them eating humans doesn't mean it can't or hasn't happened. These are the bears and lions of the sea. Except they're even smarter. I wouldn't want to be in a small boat or kayak near orcas.
- tyingq 6y ago
  They may have successfully knocked some fish off of a trawler.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if they know better than to mess with the little soft things that float.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    "They're inedible but if you flip them over, you will be rewarded with a rare delicacy"
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      "More come with sharp things and commit atrocities."
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        “So don’t get seen doing it.”
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Might be hard in the era of radios - but then, perhaps they'll develop some kind of folk knowledge: "only sink the hard, noisy, floating things during storms".
      - nicoburns 6y ago
        I heard that whales intetionally sinking ships was common throughout the whaling era, and has all but stipped since whaling was (mostly) outlawed.
        luckylion 6y ago
        Which has taught them: if you sink their ships, they will stop. We just need to figure out what demands these orcas have!
        ceejayoz 6y ago
        Modern ships are probably harder to sink, though.
        robocat 6y ago
        I wouldn’t bet on that. Modern ships can avoid obstacles using motors and navigation, and avoid storms using weather reports. Modern ships avoid sinking by technology, not strength. Fibreglass hulls in particular are quite fragile - especially sports hulls that are designed to be lighter.
        6y ago
- AlbertoGP 6y ago
  Well, there is a constant flow of small boats crossing from Africa to Spain and Italy carrying illegal immigrants, and they sometimes capsize, or some are thrown overboard either dead[1] or alive[2] by their fellow travelers. [1] https://elpais.com/espana/2020-08-07/se-les-acabo-el-agua-tiraban-los-cadaveres-por-la-borda.html https://elpais.com/espana/2020-08-07/se-les-acabo-el-agua-ti... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32337725 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32337725 That would give them plenty of opportunity to learn the connection between boats and food. However, the article notes that they do not attack the people, but the boats: “In these and all other known cases, the mammals ignored the humans who took to life rafts; it was the boats that attracted their ire.”
  - trhway 6y ago
    > ignored the humans who took to life rafts; it was the boats that attracted their ire. the sailboats have a streamlined "displacement" underwater body which naturally - due to optimizing for the same hydrodynamic laws - resembles large mammal body. With the stressed ecosystem - in particular lack of food to the extent threatening the very survival - attacking of your perceived competitor becomes the logical last available option.
  - tomxor 6y ago
    > That would give them plenty of opportunity to learn the connection between boats and food. The second half of the article is far more revealing, it details the state of the relationship between fishing, tourism and orcas in the Straits of Gibraltar - painting a particularly stark picture of the impact humans have had on obliterating their primary food source and dominating that area with noisy boats, their dwindling population and direct harm caused by fishing nets and hooks as they struggle to survive by picking fish from the nets instead. If accurate it seems far more likely any animal capable of drawing a relationships between boats and other events would make the reverse relationship you are suggesting (boats steal all their food, hurt them directly, kill their young)... If I were an Orca I'd find it hard to believe I wouldn't be knocking over smaller boats out of desperation as their local population has almost vanished (30 adults last estimate). Perhaps I'm wrong and their ability to reason on larger scales of time and space are not sufficient, but i'm pretty sure they are smart enough to know a boat is not edible - shaking humans off for food seems like a stretch but possible given they are pretty much starving, i will give you that.
- mannykannot 6y ago
  Orcas are smart, and one of the things some pods have learned to do recently is to wash seals off ice floes by swimming together to create a wave. They are in dire straits, with fishing boats taking all the fish, and maybe they are trying desperate measures to find food. The increasing migration across the Mediterranean, often in overcrowded, unseaworthy boats, raises the possibility that maybe a pod of orcas has come across a boat that is sinking, putting seal-sized, slow-moving creatures into the water...
  - quickthrowman 6y ago
    > Orcas are smart, and one of the things some pods have learned to do recently is to wash seals off ice floes by swimming together to create a wave. They are in dire straits, with fishing boats taking all the fish, and maybe they are trying desperate measures to find food. There is footage of this technique in BBC’s Frozen Planet, if anyone is curious to see it.
    - bmitc 6y ago
      They gave a pass at the cameramen as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRu3LGceAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRu3LGceAg It doesn't seem as full effort as the normal ones, so they could have been training or experimenting, both of which they are known to do. They could have been play and giving a little scare as well.
  - bmitc 6y ago
    To my knowledge, that is not recently learned behavior of orcas, regarding washing seals off floating ice islands. Further, orcas are culturally separated into many groups, often called ecotypes. Although some of these ecotypes may eventually be separated into separate species, they are currently all the same species. They are able to eat whatever food and they are able to interbreed, except that they don't. These are cultural separations that orcas have created, and they are not biological. So, certain ecotypes are fish eaters, and very particular fish eaters at that. The Southern Resident orcas in the Pacific Northwest only eat a specific type of salmon. That salmon is in major decline, and thus the orcas that eat them are in decline and for various other reasons as well such as being hunted in the 70s for capture to serve as entertainment. As far as I know, it is unknown why these orcas do not switch their food source. From what I read, these orcas performing the attacks are tuna eating orcas, so they are again fish specialists. They are likely experiencing the same threats to their food source as well. Other ecotypes, like those that you mentioned about seals, have more diverse diets typically revolving around mammals. In the Pacific Northwest, the Southern Resident (the salmon eaters) and Transients (the mammal eaters) share the same waters but do not eat each others' foods. Since the transients have more diverse sources that are not struggling, they are not struggling like the fish eating ecotypes. Thus, it's highly unlikely for fish eating orcas to suddenly want to eat orcas. There's multiple reasons. There is the cultural reasons, and there are also the reasons as humans are terrible meals. My own personal suspicions are that orcas are much closer to human level intelligence than anyone recognizes, and so my personal guess would be that these attacks are one of stress and aggression to prevent other animals stealing their food. It is also possible they've been able to reclaim tuna this way as well. There are stories of orcas in the early 20th century helping whalers, but the way I read it, it was actually the orcas training the humans to help them capture and kill the whales. Orcas are intelligent enough that they understand how things work.
- LostTrackHowM 6y ago
  Sadly I can't recall the name of the book I read as a kid, but it was all about dangerous animals. The kind of stuff pre-teen boys are super into. Well, I was hoping for adventure stories, but the book ended up being a dry and technical description of incidents. Yet, still interesting. One horror story I recall was of Orcas harassing an Inuit family in their canoe. And them having to throw one of their kids overboard to get away. No idea idea if the stories in the book were real or made up. But just based on the dry and technical descriptions, part of me has always suspected they might have been real.
  - justinclift 6y ago
    > No idea idea if the stories in the book were real or made up. Hmmm. "If you don't behave, we'll give you to the Orcas..." sounds like the kind of thing some pissed off parents would tell their kids.
    - bangonkeyboard 6y ago
      "Sedna is a giant, the daughter of the creator-god Anguta, with a great hunger that causes her to attack her parents. Angered, Anguta takes her out to sea and throws her over the side of his kayak. As she clings to the sides, he chops off her fingers and she sinks to the underworld, becoming the ruler of the monsters of the deep. Her huge fingers become the seals, walruses, and whales hunted by the Inuit." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedna_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedna_(mythology)
  - satori99 6y ago
    About a century ago on the south coast of New South Wales, A patriarch Orca named Old Tom teamed his pod up with human whalers to decimate the local baleen whale population. He co-operated with 3 generations of a human whaling family before he died a natural death. His skeleton remains on display in the local museum to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tom_(killer_whale) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tom_(killer_whale) edit: longer story about him; https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-legend-of-old-tom-and-the-gruesome-law-of-the-tongue/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-lege...
- Darmody 6y ago
  I don't think so. Orcas had many chances to kill and eat humans but they never did it. They don't see us as food. Probably their intelligence makes us interesting to them. And they don't have problems getting food from any source they want, so I'd take hunger out of the equation.
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  - AlbertoGP 6y ago
    According to the article, hunger is a factor stressing them out and making them more aggressive towards the boats, though as you note they don’t seem to want to eat humans: «The orcas return to this noisy, polluted stretch of water for one reason – to feed. They specialise in hunting bluefin tuna, also highly prized by humans. The near collapse of bluefin tuna between 2005 and 2010 “has led this orca population to the very edge, with about 30 adults left”, says Pauline Gauffier, who has studied them.»
  - jankotek 6y ago
    Orcas and sharks are after fat. Whales, seals, pinguins are great. Humans are too skiny.
    - praptak 6y ago
      They do hunt great white sharks for their livers though.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      I don't think you've updated that lil morsel of trivia in a while.
      - wizzwizz4 6y ago
        The sorts of humans that go on boats are generally not obese office workers.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  From the article: > "I’ve seen them look at boats hauling fish. I think they know that humans are somehow related to the scarcity of food" If they are really that smart, they would be smart enough to figure out humans are made of food too, right? Some orca at some point in time would've realized it and eaten a human, yet that hasn't happened. Hear me out: what if they don't kill us out of self preservation? They see the fishing boats, the harpoons. They even see the gigantic war ships, and are probably smart enough to realize that those are linked. Would we attract the ire of a species that is much more advanced than ours if it was just harvesting resources? Not until we're almost dead from starvation.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Some orca at some point in time would've realized it and eaten a human, yet that hasn't happened. There are no known attacks on humans, that doesn't mean that is hasn't happened. Orcas are generally not hunting where humans swim, and they aren't going to capsize a freighter. Plus there's better food in the water, and it's more frequent. An orca, or a family of orcas that would specialize on hunting humans would starve. We don't swim in the open sea a lot, they don't walk through towns a lot. I believe you're over-estimating their intelligence.
    - dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
      Fair point about the no known attacks. There's stories about orcas killing humans in many cultures that historically interacted with killers whales. > I believe you're over-estimating their intelligence. One of my favourite orca stories is the killers of Eden[0]. The wiki page is short and worth a read, but to summarize: a pod of whales learns to herd whales into a bay and alert humans to them. Humans harpoon them and the pod helps drag them back by pulling on the ropes. The carcass is left overnight for the pod, that eats its lips and tongue. Afterwards, the humans haul it back. Why would the orcas alert the humans unless they realized that the humans were responsible for the harpooning? Furthermore, just the act of slapping the river with water to attract attention is already quite advanced. And why did they only eat part of the whale (and always the same part)? Why did they never eat the humans? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_South_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...
- hoorayimhelping 6y ago
  Orcas don't eat typically humans, there are many examples of them not doing this when they could have. I have no evidence to support this, but if they're intelligent enough to have culture differences between pods, they might be intelligent enough to tell stories about the animals in boats on the surface and how they seem harmless, but if you attack one of them, the entire tribe of them will come and wipe out your entire family as retribution.
  - sidibe 6y ago
    Different groups of orcas have very different diets to the point where for example dolphins know it's safe to hang out with some pods but not others. Since they are very cautious and picky eaters, its possible humans were avoided but now a group has added them as OK food
    - stupendousyappi 6y ago
      Orcas are picky eaters, especially the ones that feed on fish like the Gibraltar orcas. There have been an enormous number of human-orca interactions both in the wild and in captivity, and even in the only known attacks on humans- the Sea World attacks- no orca has ever eaten a human. The likelihood that the fish-eating Gibraltar orcas are attempting to eat people is extremely low, IMO. It's much more likely an attempt to simply kill due to stress, like the Sea World orca attacks.
  - JackFr 6y ago
    For those who haven’t seen it I’d recommend the documentary Blackfish. https://www.blackfishmovie.com/ https://www.blackfishmovie.com/ The Sea World orca Tilikum killed three people, though not for eating.
    - pvaldes 6y ago
      > I’d recommend the documentary Blackfish If you see blackfish take in mind that must not be seen as an honest bona-fide documentary. Is entertaining if you understand what it really is. A fictionary monster's film. I would define it as a "blaxfishploitation" film. A new genre aimed to attract animal activists, tell them what they want to hear, and sell a rewarding sense of outrage. In order to get the desired emotional response, the film is trying to mislead the viewer all the time and takes a lot of creative licenses. Like experts talking about an orca specimen or an event, even if they never worked with orcas or had been fired decades before the arrival of the whale (so didn't have direct experience with neither the whale, nor the event). Of course they will not mention this little details in the film. Or mixing footage of people and orcas in different years and pools, to make it seem as if they are interacting in the same pool at the same time. Or inserting a few frames of whales jumping (as a normal part of the show) in the middle of an interview, to suggest a unexpected attack Or putting words in the mouth of Sea World staff to make them appear as evil, but were debunked later as false, with data. Or telling that they lied and covered facts in a trial, even if the real declarations where videotaped and show the opposite. The number of inaccuracies and false claimings does not end here. Here is a list with 69 points (that for a film of just 90 minutes is pretty astonishing): http://da15bdaf715461308003-0c725c907c2d637068751776aeee5fbf.r7.cf1.rackcdn.com/adf36e5c35b842f5ae4e2322841e8933_4-4-14-updated-final-of-blacklist-list-of-inaccuracies-and-misleading-points.pdf http://da15bdaf715461308003-0c725c907c2d637068751776aeee5fbf...
- 14 6y ago
  Interesting fact, the killer whale (orca) is a natural predator of a moose.
- Someone 6y ago
  FTA: “They target the orca, because they think there must be tuna under the pods,” says Jörn Selling, a marine biologist for Firmm whale watching and research foundation with 17 years’ experience in the Straits. “They go right through the pods, their hooks cutting the dorsal fins”. […] But many conservationists suspect some fishermen retaliate violently” I think it’s at least equally likely they learned that boats of a certain size in the neighborhood of tuna can attack their family, and do this to protect it.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  If we take your supposition as true for the sake of argument, what else would have to be true? I think specifically any boat smaller than 50' would then become a target. As there are many, many boats in the Mediterranean that are much smaller, and easily overwhelmed by Orcas, if your idea was accurate the report would include many events of people being lost and their boats being damaged. Those things haven't appeared in the press. As a result I'd guess that something more specific about these boats, or maybe this place, that has them attacking.
- RobertoG 6y ago
  >>"I wouldn't want to be in a small boat or kayak near orcas. " What about swimming with them? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTIcQMwYC1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTIcQMwYC1o These are highly intelligent animals with complex behavior and in general, they are pretty friendly to humans. I suspect that the pod in the article has some powerful reason for attacking boats.
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- telesilla 6y ago
  Fortunately humans aren't very tasty for sea animals, sharks often bite then move on. I imagine Orca already know this.
- reddog 6y ago
  Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwbNRNCxhFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwbNRNCxhFg
- emmelaich 6y ago
  Orcas are known to knock seals off ice floes, so that seems reasonable.
- pvaldes 6y ago
  > wouldn't want to be in a small boat or kayak near orcas. orcas aren't one species
- bmitc 6y ago
  See my comment below, but orcas do not switch up their food source very readily unless they are in an ecotype similar to the transients found in the Pacific Northwest. Orcas that specialize in fish do not switch up, even in the face of dire straits, even though they could. This is at least so far. Orcas' splitting up into ecotypes is almost solely cultural and not biological, and so even though we wish orcas wouldn't have to struggle, I feel we could potentially see them adapt to other food sources, but that so far has not been observed. The orcas that eat mammals have more varied diets and thus hunting techniques, since their food source requires that (mammals are smart, have good eyesight and hearing, etc.).
aazaa 6y ago
The article offers some anecdotes, but nothing to support the claim that attacks have been "unusual" in the past or are increasing in number. There's no sense of whether this is still an isolated problem, whether it has exploded in recent years, or whether there's anything that connects these attacks with attacks in other places. Local coast guards might keep track of this sort of information. But there's nothing about that one way or the other in the article. Without some quantitative handle, it's impossible to even know whether something unusual is happening here.
- stupendousyappi 6y ago
  There are no statistics because this has never been reported before. One of the key points that animal rights activists used to shut down the Sea World orca performances was that there were no reports of wild orcas ever attacking humans, indicating that the Sea World orcas must be extremely stressed. Wild orcas have had many friendly interactions with human boats, and have even successfully stolen fish from fishing boats many times, but as a layman who follows orca intelligence research as a hobby, I've never heard of attack-like incidents like this article describes before. And the scientists interviewed in the article evidently haven't either.
- occhains 6y ago
  "Rocío Espada works with the marine biology laboratory at the University of Seville and has observed this migratory population of orca in the Gibraltar Straits for years. She was astonished. “For killer whales to take out a piece of a fibreglass rudder is crazy,” she says. “I’ve seen these orcas grow from babies, I know their life stories, I’ve never seen or heard of attacks.”"
- Tiktaalik 6y ago
  > Without some quantitative handle, it's impossible to even know whether something unusual is happening here. Do you need a number? A chart? It's right there on the page. We're up to from "several" from "never". That's an astounding change in a rapid time.
  - lixtra 6y ago
stupendousyappi 6y ago
I think these are attacks by a population that's starving to death, surrounded by deafening noise (and remember, their primary sense is hearing) and poisoned by heavy metals accumulating in the food chain. I think they understand that humans and boats are responsible for the stress they're experiencing, and are attacking smaller boats that they think they can sink in desperation or anger, similar to how Tilikum snapped one day and killed Dawn Brancheau. The southern residents of the Pacific Northwest are the most studied population of wild of orcas in the world (actually, they're probably the most studied population of wild mammals). They seem to have a lot of similarities to the Gibraltar orcas- both seem to eat fish exclusively, and in fact heavily specialize in one large fish species (Chinook salmon for the southern residents, bluefin tuna for the Gibraltar orcas). Both populations appear heavily stressed due to human activity, especially food loss due to fishing, and both have experienced a crash in successful pregnancies. In the southern residents, two years ago this led to Talequah making news by carrying her dead calf for two weeks over hundreds of miles, seemingly in mourning. I think these attacks are also basically emotional and based on a correct general understanding of how boats are affecting them, and not especially different from what humans would do in a similar situation.
- bzb5 6y ago
  In your first paragraph, you might be humanising the beasts quite too much.
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    Orcas are known to be highly intelligent and are also known to be able to operate on a pretty decent level of thinking. Seeing boats take your food while you starve is not a difficult conclusion to draw that the boats are total assholes who need to be taught a lesson.
    - HaloZero 6y ago
      I remember learning Humpbacks work to deny Orcas meals sometimes. I can totally imagine Orcas connecting the dots to attack smaller boats. If anything it could just be stress + source of noise == bad. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/08/humpback-whales-save-animals-killer-whales-explained/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/08/humpback-wha...
stevespang 6y ago
Too bad they are not attacking Japanese whaling craft, of course, the Japs would just harpoon them anyway.
hirundo 6y ago
I wonder if there is some kind of noise generator that a small boat could carry that would repel, but not harm, enraged orcas. Maybe there's a whale equivalent of nails-on-chalkboard that would work without being loud enough to do damage or require too much energy to be practical. If there is an attractive rather than repellent sound that would work (a calf in distress?) maybe it could lure the grampus away with a little remote control boat. But their intelligence might make whatever does work only temporarily effective.
- tedajax 6y ago
  More than likely the noise of the boats is what is enraging the Orcas.
  - hirundo 6y ago
    Except such aggressive orcas are new while boat noises aren't. And some of these incidents are with sailboats.
    - tssva 6y ago
      Not saying I give credence to the original comment about noise being the cause but most cruising sailboats have engines and in the Mediterranean they are used quite often because the wind is often not sufficient to sail. The Mediterranean is called the Med for short and there is a joke that Med actually stands for "Motor Every Day".
- ornornor 6y ago
  Or, you know, we could learn to live together and ease up on overfishing so they also get a chance to eat without having to attack boats.
bmurphy1976 6y ago
I see a lot of crazy speculation in these comments. Seems to me they are just attacking a competitor, something almost all animals do in some fashion. They aren't dumb but they aren't human either. They don't have our motivations.
- ornornor 6y ago
  How would you know though?
jariel 6y ago
On TikTok I saw a man drop is cellphone into the water. A watching Beluga promptly swam over, picked up in his mouth and delivered to him. It was amazing. The animal clearly saw the man drop the item, but also seemed to be aware of the man's inability to fetch it, and that perhaps it was a 'possession' of some kind. It seems ver reasonable to me that mammals have emotions, memories, and rational emotional response. If they were 'hurt' by a boat it seems super rational to me that they would be angered by or dislike boats. I suspect they are aware 'boats do fishing' and can directly correlate their hunger to the boats. I don't know why this isn't the first response, and is considered 'unscientific' in the article.
- stupendousyappi 6y ago
  Assuming you're taking about a Beluga in Norway, that whale was likely trained by the Russian military to do something vaguely similar.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  This is going to sound crazy but I've been in the water and looked a dolphin right in the eye from about a meter away. I'm taking out in the middle of the ocean. I could definitely sense this from the animal. So I definitely think they have emotions and much more intelligence than people give them credit for.
tpmx 6y ago
I like turtles! (Yeah, I deleted my comments and edited this one because of the gaia mob. Sorry.)
- notduncansmith 6y ago
  Interesting that this is labeled a “hypothesis” and not a self-evident truth. What else would it be?
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- guerrilla 6y ago
  Hardly. It sounds much more like simply respecting their intelligence and their drive to defend themselves rather than thinking of them as dumb things. The Gaia hypothesis is more about ecological interconnectivity and wholes rather than parts and both are missing from GPs statement. The idea that orcas have agency doesn't depend on whether its useful to think of entire ecosystems as having agency or not.
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  - stanfordkid 6y ago
    There is a component of the Gaia hypothesis which seems anthropomorphic, but this is a reductive way of understanding the theory. The way you need to understand it is that most natural systems implement homeostasis on multiple scales, and information transferred between organisms has a somewhat communicable nature because organisms evolved and competed within a shared environment -- e.g human beings proteins are responses to environmental conditions.
    - guerrilla 6y ago
      I agree that that is a better understanding of what is being proposed but feel it could have been phrased with less presumption about my understanding as it comes off a bit condescending. I didn't intend to rule that out, nor go into detail. I hinted at what you're saying in referring to holism.
RandyRanderson 6y ago
They are probably orca-hestrated attacks...
- notduncansmith 6y ago
  It takes guts to go for such a stretched auditory pun via text, kudos to you
- djmips 6y ago
  go back to reddit
rdiddly 6y ago
Seems mind-boggling to me that the article mentions, but makes no comment whatsoever on, the fact that in every case the boat was turned around. Like not just turned, but turned 180 degrees or close to it. Just in case you've been locked in a geometry classroom since birth, 180º is what we out here might refer to as "back the way you came." Orcas be like: "Hey, nice to see you, welcome to our feeding area, too bad you can't stay, here's your coat & hat, don't let the door hit you etc etc!" I certainly wouldn't want to imply in the slightest that huuu-mons are narcissistic or focused only on themselves (like "ouch the kick from the shotgun hurt my thumb" is how we might summarize a shot that ruined the lives of an entire pheasant family), but would we be sad to find out that things like "attacking us" and "scaring us", "and making us feel totally powerless by breaking our rudder," all of which figure prominently in the human experience of the encounter, don't even merit a mention in the orca newspaper article about it? Could it be that the orca newspaper article (just bear with me for chrissakes) simply says "Another Boat Found in Feeding Area" and goes on to describe how so-and-so and his crew followed procedure and first broke the rudder, which they've figured out seems to be a prerequisite for taking over steering, and then turned the intruder away?
Ccecil 6y ago
Absolute shot in the dark, I have near-zero knowledge of Orca and even less about sailing...but I did notice one common link in the article. They were using autohelms. Are the ones they are using commercial ones? Are they homebrew (which is becoming more common in the raspi world)? Could it be that the PWM motor control on the autohelm is bothering them...it could resonate down the rudder and essentially make a speaker. Once the Orca destroy the sound they seem to be leaving. Again...total shot in the dark. Just trying to spur some thought in other directions.
- stupendousyappi 6y ago
  On the one hand, I have a hard time imagining that noise being more bothersome than the motor of powered boats, but with a sample size of two, it fits the data as well as any other theory. Having said that, I think the simplest explanation for targeting sailboats is simply that the orcas are less likely to be injured by the motor, and it doesn't blast deafening static when you get close to it.
  - Ccecil 6y ago
    It has no motor sound...but has a varying "whine". Also, when the rudder is bumped that whine is going to change due to attempting to realign...which could sound like an injured cry. I know people younger than me complain about the pwm sound from my stepper drivers on my printers...but I cannot hear it.
- clort 6y ago
  nearly all leisure boats on a long passage would be using an autopilot of some kind though and the vast majority of those are electric motor driven. perhaps the sample is pre-selected to have autohelm in that case..
  - spurgu 6y ago
    I wouldn't say "vast" majority. Windvane self-steering gear is quite common on long distance cruising sailboats. I would personally not rely solely on an autopilot, though it's nice to have in addition, for when motoring. The exception might be an RPi driven DIY autopilot where you can carry spare actuators (and spare RPi's), but that still requires electricity so would be useless in an emergency where you lose power (thunder strike or water shorting the batteries). All in all I find it weird why this is happening now all of a sudden . We've been overfishing for decades and it's not like there's been a large increase in maritime activity lately. Mybe they just finally had enough and snapped.. Would hate to see the sea become a hostile environment for humans, but we also have it coming.
edsonmedina 6y ago
I've read stories of whales attacking boats before, and theories about they being bothered by the boat's sonar.
ManuelKiessling 6y ago
Gangs of Gibraltar.
bambax 6y ago
This is the first § of the article: > Reports of orcas striking sailing boats in the Straits of Gibraltar have left sailors and scientists confused. Just what is causing such unusually aggressive behaviour? We don't know if orcas are "stressed" or if they're having fun, or if they patiently, rationally decided to wage a war against humans on boats. Adding "stressed" in the title is a judgment call, and a condescending one.
- mediaman 6y ago
  The rest of the article goes on to detail the collapsing population of orcas, and the reasons why. It's not a stretch to say a population with catastrophically declining population is likely stressed.
- oska 6y ago
  I'm the submitter. The whole second half of the article details the ways in which this orca population is stressed. It describes how their population has rapidly declined, they have much less food and there is evidence of them suffering injury from fishing nets and lines and possibly attacks from fishermen. Not to mention the noise and pollution generated by the heavy traffic in that stretch of water. Stressed then is an objective description and not 'a condescending one'. Anyway, the title has been changed now. I don't mind but I don't think adding stressed was unfair, given the details of stress described in the article I have outlined above.
mrlonglong 6y ago
I have a theory - that they know we're taking too much fish out of the seas and they want us to stop.
srean 6y ago
In case it gives some HNers joy, India now recognizes Orcas as non-human person [0]. India is the fourth country in the world to ban the capture and import of cetaceans for the purpose of commercial entertainment - along with Costa Rica, Hungary, and Chile. Me thinks that it is about time. [0] https://www.dw.com/en/dolphins-gain-unprecedented-protection-in-india/a-16834519 https://www.dw.com/en/dolphins-gain-unprecedented-protection...
- meowface 6y ago
  It seems backwards, to me, and I suspect it will be widely viewed as backwards in the distant future. Why a top-down approach? Countless other species are sentient like orcas are, even if they may not be quite as cognitively adept as orcas at certain tasks or quite as fortunate to receive the same amkunt of marketing and PR. Why is this a default deny policy, with just a few exceptions for the tiny few species we feel hold the relative position of more valuable than other species? If orcas never existed, would they award their runner-up the get-out-of-kill-free card instead? I think it should be the inverse, with extremely rigorous criteria and years of deliberation over which species to exclude, rather than which ones to include. Don't get me wrong, I prefer one over none, but it feels a little bit like Saudi Arabia finally permitting women to drive and then showering them with praise for their admirable feminist ethos. I don't know when the day might come, but I think it's inevitable in the long run that this inverted approach will be what almost everyone does and almost everyone will be absolutely baffled and mortified that it used to be done any other way. I don't know whether or not any of us will live to see that day, but I'm prety confident it'll happen eventually.
aaron695 6y ago
Covid-19 It's causing aassive amount of shark deaths in Australia - https://taronga.org.au/conservation-and-science/australian-shark-attack-file https://taronga.org.au/conservation-and-science/australian-s... This is assuming it's this year this orca phenomenon is happening. Not sure why. I'd start by at looking at engine noise no longer scaring off these predators.
29athrowaway 6y ago
Another interesting phenomenon are the sharks that destroy undersea optical cables.
tus88 6y ago
It begins.
sunstone 6y ago
I believe there was a story some years ago about a sail boat in the pacific, about a day's sail from the Panama Canal that was broken up by a pod of killer whales.
zelphirkalt 6y ago
I can already hear some people cry out: "But they are attacking _our boats_!! We need to do something!" in believe how there is some evil animal out there, simply out to take away their fun. Then they arm themselves up with harpoons, because: "Well, not going to shoot them, _unless_ they attack my boat!! It's only self-defense!" Just like with people, who need to go where polar bears are and arm themselves with rifles, because they might "have no choice" when attacked by starving polar bear. This is so short sighted. For those people, all that counts is their "fun" while on this planet. They pay for some service, that is available and don't feel any responsibility. Perhaps simply don't f* go there and have fun somewhere else?! But no, fun is more important than the life of endangered species, so these kind of tours are still offered. Money can be made. Money, you understand? Omg it's money! It's disgusting and I believe, that no one has the right to shoot a polar bear, even in self-defense. Please simply die, get eaten, instead of killing one of those endangered beings. There are enough humans here, we don't need you and neither does this planet.
- rainbowzootsuit 6y ago
  "It's coming right for us!" —Uncle Jimbo
- userbinator 6y ago
  Please simply die You first.
asdasfasdfasdf 6y ago
Good for them.
hevelvarik 6y ago
>This tiny population’s presence is of huge importance, and if human activity is affecting their behaviour, human activity must be regulated. This is thrown in at the end. Why is the presence of 30-50 adult orca distributed over 5 pods in this particular part of the ocean of huge importance?
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  Apex predators are always of huge importance.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade
  - hevelvarik 6y ago
    I’ll read through that article but since the article discusses a general dynamic it’s fair to reason about whether and to what extent that dynamic is in play in a given particular context . It seems that the point of ‘contention’ here is food scarcity and competition for Tuna, and it seems the orca are losing the point and either the humans have acquired the role of apex predator in that particular part of the ocean or at the least the orcas’ services as such are no longer required. It may be that reading this article will provide the wherewithal to answer this question but perhaps there’s someone here who understands the particulars and can shed some light.
zaarn 6y ago
Sounds like the intro of The Swarm, the novel.
gyvastis 6y ago
Nature exists? Surprise, haha

290 points by oska 6y ago

Crazy, this popped up in my YouTube subscriptions two days ago. https://youtu.be/pgPfkqQcIZs https://youtu.be/pgPfkqQcIZs They do seem to know what they're doing by going after rudders and keels. And they seem to take off when they have accomplished their objective.

echelon 6y ago

The "stressed" angle is interesting, and I appreciate it since these are experts discussing the matter. I wonder, however, if there is something more sinister at play. Orcas are very intelligent animals. Is there a chance that they knocked a lone sailor off of a boat once and found a new food source? What if they're trying to replicate previous success? The entire pod could have learned this behavior. Orcas are known to eat large terrestrial mammals. The fact that we don't have a documented case of them eating humans doesn't mean it can't or hasn't happened. These are the bears and lions of the sea. Except they're even smarter. I wouldn't want to be in a small boat or kayak near orcas.

tyingq 6y ago
They may have successfully knocked some fish off of a trawler.
maxerickson 6y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they know better than to mess with the little soft things that float.
- luckylion 6y ago
  "They're inedible but if you flip them over, you will be rewarded with a rare delicacy"
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    "More come with sharp things and commit atrocities."
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      “So don’t get seen doing it.”
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Might be hard in the era of radios - but then, perhaps they'll develop some kind of folk knowledge: "only sink the hard, noisy, floating things during storms".
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      I heard that whales intetionally sinking ships was common throughout the whaling era, and has all but stipped since whaling was (mostly) outlawed.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        Which has taught them: if you sink their ships, they will stop. We just need to figure out what demands these orcas have!
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        Modern ships are probably harder to sink, though.
        robocat 6y ago
        I wouldn’t bet on that. Modern ships can avoid obstacles using motors and navigation, and avoid storms using weather reports. Modern ships avoid sinking by technology, not strength. Fibreglass hulls in particular are quite fragile - especially sports hulls that are designed to be lighter.
      - 6y ago
AlbertoGP 6y ago
Well, there is a constant flow of small boats crossing from Africa to Spain and Italy carrying illegal immigrants, and they sometimes capsize, or some are thrown overboard either dead[1] or alive[2] by their fellow travelers. [1] https://elpais.com/espana/2020-08-07/se-les-acabo-el-agua-tiraban-los-cadaveres-por-la-borda.html https://elpais.com/espana/2020-08-07/se-les-acabo-el-agua-ti... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32337725 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32337725 That would give them plenty of opportunity to learn the connection between boats and food. However, the article notes that they do not attack the people, but the boats: “In these and all other known cases, the mammals ignored the humans who took to life rafts; it was the boats that attracted their ire.”
- trhway 6y ago
  > ignored the humans who took to life rafts; it was the boats that attracted their ire. the sailboats have a streamlined "displacement" underwater body which naturally - due to optimizing for the same hydrodynamic laws - resembles large mammal body. With the stressed ecosystem - in particular lack of food to the extent threatening the very survival - attacking of your perceived competitor becomes the logical last available option.
- tomxor 6y ago
  > That would give them plenty of opportunity to learn the connection between boats and food. The second half of the article is far more revealing, it details the state of the relationship between fishing, tourism and orcas in the Straits of Gibraltar - painting a particularly stark picture of the impact humans have had on obliterating their primary food source and dominating that area with noisy boats, their dwindling population and direct harm caused by fishing nets and hooks as they struggle to survive by picking fish from the nets instead. If accurate it seems far more likely any animal capable of drawing a relationships between boats and other events would make the reverse relationship you are suggesting (boats steal all their food, hurt them directly, kill their young)... If I were an Orca I'd find it hard to believe I wouldn't be knocking over smaller boats out of desperation as their local population has almost vanished (30 adults last estimate). Perhaps I'm wrong and their ability to reason on larger scales of time and space are not sufficient, but i'm pretty sure they are smart enough to know a boat is not edible - shaking humans off for food seems like a stretch but possible given they are pretty much starving, i will give you that.
mannykannot 6y ago
Orcas are smart, and one of the things some pods have learned to do recently is to wash seals off ice floes by swimming together to create a wave. They are in dire straits, with fishing boats taking all the fish, and maybe they are trying desperate measures to find food. The increasing migration across the Mediterranean, often in overcrowded, unseaworthy boats, raises the possibility that maybe a pod of orcas has come across a boat that is sinking, putting seal-sized, slow-moving creatures into the water...
- quickthrowman 6y ago
  > Orcas are smart, and one of the things some pods have learned to do recently is to wash seals off ice floes by swimming together to create a wave. They are in dire straits, with fishing boats taking all the fish, and maybe they are trying desperate measures to find food. There is footage of this technique in BBC’s Frozen Planet, if anyone is curious to see it.
  - bmitc 6y ago
    They gave a pass at the cameramen as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRu3LGceAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRu3LGceAg It doesn't seem as full effort as the normal ones, so they could have been training or experimenting, both of which they are known to do. They could have been play and giving a little scare as well.
- bmitc 6y ago
  To my knowledge, that is not recently learned behavior of orcas, regarding washing seals off floating ice islands. Further, orcas are culturally separated into many groups, often called ecotypes. Although some of these ecotypes may eventually be separated into separate species, they are currently all the same species. They are able to eat whatever food and they are able to interbreed, except that they don't. These are cultural separations that orcas have created, and they are not biological. So, certain ecotypes are fish eaters, and very particular fish eaters at that. The Southern Resident orcas in the Pacific Northwest only eat a specific type of salmon. That salmon is in major decline, and thus the orcas that eat them are in decline and for various other reasons as well such as being hunted in the 70s for capture to serve as entertainment. As far as I know, it is unknown why these orcas do not switch their food source. From what I read, these orcas performing the attacks are tuna eating orcas, so they are again fish specialists. They are likely experiencing the same threats to their food source as well. Other ecotypes, like those that you mentioned about seals, have more diverse diets typically revolving around mammals. In the Pacific Northwest, the Southern Resident (the salmon eaters) and Transients (the mammal eaters) share the same waters but do not eat each others' foods. Since the transients have more diverse sources that are not struggling, they are not struggling like the fish eating ecotypes. Thus, it's highly unlikely for fish eating orcas to suddenly want to eat orcas. There's multiple reasons. There is the cultural reasons, and there are also the reasons as humans are terrible meals. My own personal suspicions are that orcas are much closer to human level intelligence than anyone recognizes, and so my personal guess would be that these attacks are one of stress and aggression to prevent other animals stealing their food. It is also possible they've been able to reclaim tuna this way as well. There are stories of orcas in the early 20th century helping whalers, but the way I read it, it was actually the orcas training the humans to help them capture and kill the whales. Orcas are intelligent enough that they understand how things work.
LostTrackHowM 6y ago
Sadly I can't recall the name of the book I read as a kid, but it was all about dangerous animals. The kind of stuff pre-teen boys are super into. Well, I was hoping for adventure stories, but the book ended up being a dry and technical description of incidents. Yet, still interesting. One horror story I recall was of Orcas harassing an Inuit family in their canoe. And them having to throw one of their kids overboard to get away. No idea idea if the stories in the book were real or made up. But just based on the dry and technical descriptions, part of me has always suspected they might have been real.
- justinclift 6y ago
  > No idea idea if the stories in the book were real or made up. Hmmm. "If you don't behave, we'll give you to the Orcas..." sounds like the kind of thing some pissed off parents would tell their kids.
  - bangonkeyboard 6y ago
    "Sedna is a giant, the daughter of the creator-god Anguta, with a great hunger that causes her to attack her parents. Angered, Anguta takes her out to sea and throws her over the side of his kayak. As she clings to the sides, he chops off her fingers and she sinks to the underworld, becoming the ruler of the monsters of the deep. Her huge fingers become the seals, walruses, and whales hunted by the Inuit." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedna_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedna_(mythology)
- satori99 6y ago
  About a century ago on the south coast of New South Wales, A patriarch Orca named Old Tom teamed his pod up with human whalers to decimate the local baleen whale population. He co-operated with 3 generations of a human whaling family before he died a natural death. His skeleton remains on display in the local museum to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tom_(killer_whale) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tom_(killer_whale) edit: longer story about him; https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-legend-of-old-tom-and-the-gruesome-law-of-the-tongue/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-lege...
Darmody 6y ago
I don't think so. Orcas had many chances to kill and eat humans but they never did it. They don't see us as food. Probably their intelligence makes us interesting to them. And they don't have problems getting food from any source they want, so I'd take hunger out of the equation.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- AlbertoGP 6y ago
  According to the article, hunger is a factor stressing them out and making them more aggressive towards the boats, though as you note they don’t seem to want to eat humans: «The orcas return to this noisy, polluted stretch of water for one reason – to feed. They specialise in hunting bluefin tuna, also highly prized by humans. The near collapse of bluefin tuna between 2005 and 2010 “has led this orca population to the very edge, with about 30 adults left”, says Pauline Gauffier, who has studied them.»
- jankotek 6y ago
  Orcas and sharks are after fat. Whales, seals, pinguins are great. Humans are too skiny.
  - praptak 6y ago
    They do hunt great white sharks for their livers though.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    I don't think you've updated that lil morsel of trivia in a while.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      The sorts of humans that go on boats are generally not obese office workers.
dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
From the article: > "I’ve seen them look at boats hauling fish. I think they know that humans are somehow related to the scarcity of food" If they are really that smart, they would be smart enough to figure out humans are made of food too, right? Some orca at some point in time would've realized it and eaten a human, yet that hasn't happened. Hear me out: what if they don't kill us out of self preservation? They see the fishing boats, the harpoons. They even see the gigantic war ships, and are probably smart enough to realize that those are linked. Would we attract the ire of a species that is much more advanced than ours if it was just harvesting resources? Not until we're almost dead from starvation.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Some orca at some point in time would've realized it and eaten a human, yet that hasn't happened. There are no known attacks on humans, that doesn't mean that is hasn't happened. Orcas are generally not hunting where humans swim, and they aren't going to capsize a freighter. Plus there's better food in the water, and it's more frequent. An orca, or a family of orcas that would specialize on hunting humans would starve. We don't swim in the open sea a lot, they don't walk through towns a lot. I believe you're over-estimating their intelligence.
  - dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
    Fair point about the no known attacks. There's stories about orcas killing humans in many cultures that historically interacted with killers whales. > I believe you're over-estimating their intelligence. One of my favourite orca stories is the killers of Eden[0]. The wiki page is short and worth a read, but to summarize: a pod of whales learns to herd whales into a bay and alert humans to them. Humans harpoon them and the pod helps drag them back by pulling on the ropes. The carcass is left overnight for the pod, that eats its lips and tongue. Afterwards, the humans haul it back. Why would the orcas alert the humans unless they realized that the humans were responsible for the harpooning? Furthermore, just the act of slapping the river with water to attract attention is already quite advanced. And why did they only eat part of the whale (and always the same part)? Why did they never eat the humans? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_South_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...
hoorayimhelping 6y ago
Orcas don't eat typically humans, there are many examples of them not doing this when they could have. I have no evidence to support this, but if they're intelligent enough to have culture differences between pods, they might be intelligent enough to tell stories about the animals in boats on the surface and how they seem harmless, but if you attack one of them, the entire tribe of them will come and wipe out your entire family as retribution.
- sidibe 6y ago
  Different groups of orcas have very different diets to the point where for example dolphins know it's safe to hang out with some pods but not others. Since they are very cautious and picky eaters, its possible humans were avoided but now a group has added them as OK food
  - stupendousyappi 6y ago
    Orcas are picky eaters, especially the ones that feed on fish like the Gibraltar orcas. There have been an enormous number of human-orca interactions both in the wild and in captivity, and even in the only known attacks on humans- the Sea World attacks- no orca has ever eaten a human. The likelihood that the fish-eating Gibraltar orcas are attempting to eat people is extremely low, IMO. It's much more likely an attempt to simply kill due to stress, like the Sea World orca attacks.
- JackFr 6y ago
  For those who haven’t seen it I’d recommend the documentary Blackfish. https://www.blackfishmovie.com/ https://www.blackfishmovie.com/ The Sea World orca Tilikum killed three people, though not for eating.
  - pvaldes 6y ago
    > I’d recommend the documentary Blackfish If you see blackfish take in mind that must not be seen as an honest bona-fide documentary. Is entertaining if you understand what it really is. A fictionary monster's film. I would define it as a "blaxfishploitation" film. A new genre aimed to attract animal activists, tell them what they want to hear, and sell a rewarding sense of outrage. In order to get the desired emotional response, the film is trying to mislead the viewer all the time and takes a lot of creative licenses. Like experts talking about an orca specimen or an event, even if they never worked with orcas or had been fired decades before the arrival of the whale (so didn't have direct experience with neither the whale, nor the event). Of course they will not mention this little details in the film. Or mixing footage of people and orcas in different years and pools, to make it seem as if they are interacting in the same pool at the same time. Or inserting a few frames of whales jumping (as a normal part of the show) in the middle of an interview, to suggest a unexpected attack Or putting words in the mouth of Sea World staff to make them appear as evil, but were debunked later as false, with data. Or telling that they lied and covered facts in a trial, even if the real declarations where videotaped and show the opposite. The number of inaccuracies and false claimings does not end here. Here is a list with 69 points (that for a film of just 90 minutes is pretty astonishing): http://da15bdaf715461308003-0c725c907c2d637068751776aeee5fbf.r7.cf1.rackcdn.com/adf36e5c35b842f5ae4e2322841e8933_4-4-14-updated-final-of-blacklist-list-of-inaccuracies-and-misleading-points.pdf http://da15bdaf715461308003-0c725c907c2d637068751776aeee5fbf...
14 6y ago
Interesting fact, the killer whale (orca) is a natural predator of a moose.
Someone 6y ago
FTA: “They target the orca, because they think there must be tuna under the pods,” says Jörn Selling, a marine biologist for Firmm whale watching and research foundation with 17 years’ experience in the Straits. “They go right through the pods, their hooks cutting the dorsal fins”. […] But many conservationists suspect some fishermen retaliate violently” I think it’s at least equally likely they learned that boats of a certain size in the neighborhood of tuna can attack their family, and do this to protect it.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
If we take your supposition as true for the sake of argument, what else would have to be true? I think specifically any boat smaller than 50' would then become a target. As there are many, many boats in the Mediterranean that are much smaller, and easily overwhelmed by Orcas, if your idea was accurate the report would include many events of people being lost and their boats being damaged. Those things haven't appeared in the press. As a result I'd guess that something more specific about these boats, or maybe this place, that has them attacking.
RobertoG 6y ago
>>"I wouldn't want to be in a small boat or kayak near orcas. " What about swimming with them? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTIcQMwYC1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTIcQMwYC1o These are highly intelligent animals with complex behavior and in general, they are pretty friendly to humans. I suspect that the pod in the article has some powerful reason for attacking boats.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
telesilla 6y ago
Fortunately humans aren't very tasty for sea animals, sharks often bite then move on. I imagine Orca already know this.
reddog 6y ago
Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwbNRNCxhFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwbNRNCxhFg
emmelaich 6y ago
Orcas are known to knock seals off ice floes, so that seems reasonable.
pvaldes 6y ago
> wouldn't want to be in a small boat or kayak near orcas. orcas aren't one species
bmitc 6y ago
See my comment below, but orcas do not switch up their food source very readily unless they are in an ecotype similar to the transients found in the Pacific Northwest. Orcas that specialize in fish do not switch up, even in the face of dire straits, even though they could. This is at least so far. Orcas' splitting up into ecotypes is almost solely cultural and not biological, and so even though we wish orcas wouldn't have to struggle, I feel we could potentially see them adapt to other food sources, but that so far has not been observed. The orcas that eat mammals have more varied diets and thus hunting techniques, since their food source requires that (mammals are smart, have good eyesight and hearing, etc.).

aazaa 6y ago

The article offers some anecdotes, but nothing to support the claim that attacks have been "unusual" in the past or are increasing in number. There's no sense of whether this is still an isolated problem, whether it has exploded in recent years, or whether there's anything that connects these attacks with attacks in other places. Local coast guards might keep track of this sort of information. But there's nothing about that one way or the other in the article. Without some quantitative handle, it's impossible to even know whether something unusual is happening here.

stupendousyappi 6y ago
There are no statistics because this has never been reported before. One of the key points that animal rights activists used to shut down the Sea World orca performances was that there were no reports of wild orcas ever attacking humans, indicating that the Sea World orcas must be extremely stressed. Wild orcas have had many friendly interactions with human boats, and have even successfully stolen fish from fishing boats many times, but as a layman who follows orca intelligence research as a hobby, I've never heard of attack-like incidents like this article describes before. And the scientists interviewed in the article evidently haven't either.
occhains 6y ago
"Rocío Espada works with the marine biology laboratory at the University of Seville and has observed this migratory population of orca in the Gibraltar Straits for years. She was astonished. “For killer whales to take out a piece of a fibreglass rudder is crazy,” she says. “I’ve seen these orcas grow from babies, I know their life stories, I’ve never seen or heard of attacks.”"
Tiktaalik 6y ago
> Without some quantitative handle, it's impossible to even know whether something unusual is happening here. Do you need a number? A chart? It's right there on the page. We're up to from "several" from "never". That's an astounding change in a rapid time.
- lixtra 6y ago

stupendousyappi 6y ago

I think these are attacks by a population that's starving to death, surrounded by deafening noise (and remember, their primary sense is hearing) and poisoned by heavy metals accumulating in the food chain. I think they understand that humans and boats are responsible for the stress they're experiencing, and are attacking smaller boats that they think they can sink in desperation or anger, similar to how Tilikum snapped one day and killed Dawn Brancheau. The southern residents of the Pacific Northwest are the most studied population of wild of orcas in the world (actually, they're probably the most studied population of wild mammals). They seem to have a lot of similarities to the Gibraltar orcas- both seem to eat fish exclusively, and in fact heavily specialize in one large fish species (Chinook salmon for the southern residents, bluefin tuna for the Gibraltar orcas). Both populations appear heavily stressed due to human activity, especially food loss due to fishing, and both have experienced a crash in successful pregnancies. In the southern residents, two years ago this led to Talequah making news by carrying her dead calf for two weeks over hundreds of miles, seemingly in mourning. I think these attacks are also basically emotional and based on a correct general understanding of how boats are affecting them, and not especially different from what humans would do in a similar situation.

bzb5 6y ago
In your first paragraph, you might be humanising the beasts quite too much.
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  Orcas are known to be highly intelligent and are also known to be able to operate on a pretty decent level of thinking. Seeing boats take your food while you starve is not a difficult conclusion to draw that the boats are total assholes who need to be taught a lesson.
  - HaloZero 6y ago
    I remember learning Humpbacks work to deny Orcas meals sometimes. I can totally imagine Orcas connecting the dots to attack smaller boats. If anything it could just be stress + source of noise == bad. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/08/humpback-whales-save-animals-killer-whales-explained/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/08/humpback-wha...

stevespang 6y ago

Too bad they are not attacking Japanese whaling craft, of course, the Japs would just harpoon them anyway.

hirundo 6y ago

I wonder if there is some kind of noise generator that a small boat could carry that would repel, but not harm, enraged orcas. Maybe there's a whale equivalent of nails-on-chalkboard that would work without being loud enough to do damage or require too much energy to be practical. If there is an attractive rather than repellent sound that would work (a calf in distress?) maybe it could lure the grampus away with a little remote control boat. But their intelligence might make whatever does work only temporarily effective.

tedajax 6y ago
More than likely the noise of the boats is what is enraging the Orcas.
- hirundo 6y ago
  Except such aggressive orcas are new while boat noises aren't. And some of these incidents are with sailboats.
  - tssva 6y ago
    Not saying I give credence to the original comment about noise being the cause but most cruising sailboats have engines and in the Mediterranean they are used quite often because the wind is often not sufficient to sail. The Mediterranean is called the Med for short and there is a joke that Med actually stands for "Motor Every Day".
ornornor 6y ago
Or, you know, we could learn to live together and ease up on overfishing so they also get a chance to eat without having to attack boats.

bmurphy1976 6y ago

I see a lot of crazy speculation in these comments. Seems to me they are just attacking a competitor, something almost all animals do in some fashion. They aren't dumb but they aren't human either. They don't have our motivations.

ornornor 6y ago
How would you know though?

jariel 6y ago

On TikTok I saw a man drop is cellphone into the water. A watching Beluga promptly swam over, picked up in his mouth and delivered to him. It was amazing. The animal clearly saw the man drop the item, but also seemed to be aware of the man's inability to fetch it, and that perhaps it was a 'possession' of some kind. It seems ver reasonable to me that mammals have emotions, memories, and rational emotional response. If they were 'hurt' by a boat it seems super rational to me that they would be angered by or dislike boats. I suspect they are aware 'boats do fishing' and can directly correlate their hunger to the boats. I don't know why this isn't the first response, and is considered 'unscientific' in the article.

stupendousyappi 6y ago
Assuming you're taking about a Beluga in Norway, that whale was likely trained by the Russian military to do something vaguely similar.
kilroy123 6y ago
This is going to sound crazy but I've been in the water and looked a dolphin right in the eye from about a meter away. I'm taking out in the middle of the ocean. I could definitely sense this from the animal. So I definitely think they have emotions and much more intelligence than people give them credit for.

tpmx 6y ago

I like turtles! (Yeah, I deleted my comments and edited this one because of the gaia mob. Sorry.)

notduncansmith 6y ago
Interesting that this is labeled a “hypothesis” and not a self-evident truth. What else would it be?
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guerrilla 6y ago
Hardly. It sounds much more like simply respecting their intelligence and their drive to defend themselves rather than thinking of them as dumb things. The Gaia hypothesis is more about ecological interconnectivity and wholes rather than parts and both are missing from GPs statement. The idea that orcas have agency doesn't depend on whether its useful to think of entire ecosystems as having agency or not.
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- stanfordkid 6y ago
  There is a component of the Gaia hypothesis which seems anthropomorphic, but this is a reductive way of understanding the theory. The way you need to understand it is that most natural systems implement homeostasis on multiple scales, and information transferred between organisms has a somewhat communicable nature because organisms evolved and competed within a shared environment -- e.g human beings proteins are responses to environmental conditions.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    I agree that that is a better understanding of what is being proposed but feel it could have been phrased with less presumption about my understanding as it comes off a bit condescending. I didn't intend to rule that out, nor go into detail. I hinted at what you're saying in referring to holism.

RandyRanderson 6y ago

They are probably orca-hestrated attacks...

notduncansmith 6y ago
It takes guts to go for such a stretched auditory pun via text, kudos to you
djmips 6y ago
go back to reddit

rdiddly 6y ago

Seems mind-boggling to me that the article mentions, but makes no comment whatsoever on, the fact that in every case the boat was turned around. Like not just turned, but turned 180 degrees or close to it. Just in case you've been locked in a geometry classroom since birth, 180º is what we out here might refer to as "back the way you came." Orcas be like: "Hey, nice to see you, welcome to our feeding area, too bad you can't stay, here's your coat & hat, don't let the door hit you etc etc!" I certainly wouldn't want to imply in the slightest that huuu-mons are narcissistic or focused only on themselves (like "ouch the kick from the shotgun hurt my thumb" is how we might summarize a shot that ruined the lives of an entire pheasant family), but would we be sad to find out that things like "attacking us" and "scaring us", "and making us feel totally powerless by breaking our rudder," all of which figure prominently in the human experience of the encounter, don't even merit a mention in the orca newspaper article about it? Could it be that the orca newspaper article (just bear with me for chrissakes) simply says "Another Boat Found in Feeding Area" and goes on to describe how so-and-so and his crew followed procedure and first broke the rudder, which they've figured out seems to be a prerequisite for taking over steering, and then turned the intruder away?

Ccecil 6y ago

Absolute shot in the dark, I have near-zero knowledge of Orca and even less about sailing...but I did notice one common link in the article. They were using autohelms. Are the ones they are using commercial ones? Are they homebrew (which is becoming more common in the raspi world)? Could it be that the PWM motor control on the autohelm is bothering them...it could resonate down the rudder and essentially make a speaker. Once the Orca destroy the sound they seem to be leaving. Again...total shot in the dark. Just trying to spur some thought in other directions.

stupendousyappi 6y ago
On the one hand, I have a hard time imagining that noise being more bothersome than the motor of powered boats, but with a sample size of two, it fits the data as well as any other theory. Having said that, I think the simplest explanation for targeting sailboats is simply that the orcas are less likely to be injured by the motor, and it doesn't blast deafening static when you get close to it.
- Ccecil 6y ago
  It has no motor sound...but has a varying "whine". Also, when the rudder is bumped that whine is going to change due to attempting to realign...which could sound like an injured cry. I know people younger than me complain about the pwm sound from my stepper drivers on my printers...but I cannot hear it.
clort 6y ago
nearly all leisure boats on a long passage would be using an autopilot of some kind though and the vast majority of those are electric motor driven. perhaps the sample is pre-selected to have autohelm in that case..
- spurgu 6y ago
  I wouldn't say "vast" majority. Windvane self-steering gear is quite common on long distance cruising sailboats. I would personally not rely solely on an autopilot, though it's nice to have in addition, for when motoring. The exception might be an RPi driven DIY autopilot where you can carry spare actuators (and spare RPi's), but that still requires electricity so would be useless in an emergency where you lose power (thunder strike or water shorting the batteries). All in all I find it weird why this is happening now all of a sudden . We've been overfishing for decades and it's not like there's been a large increase in maritime activity lately. Mybe they just finally had enough and snapped.. Would hate to see the sea become a hostile environment for humans, but we also have it coming.

edsonmedina 6y ago

I've read stories of whales attacking boats before, and theories about they being bothered by the boat's sonar.

ManuelKiessling 6y ago

Gangs of Gibraltar.

bambax 6y ago

This is the first § of the article: > Reports of orcas striking sailing boats in the Straits of Gibraltar have left sailors and scientists confused. Just what is causing such unusually aggressive behaviour? We don't know if orcas are "stressed" or if they're having fun, or if they patiently, rationally decided to wage a war against humans on boats. Adding "stressed" in the title is a judgment call, and a condescending one.

mediaman 6y ago
The rest of the article goes on to detail the collapsing population of orcas, and the reasons why. It's not a stretch to say a population with catastrophically declining population is likely stressed.
oska 6y ago
I'm the submitter. The whole second half of the article details the ways in which this orca population is stressed. It describes how their population has rapidly declined, they have much less food and there is evidence of them suffering injury from fishing nets and lines and possibly attacks from fishermen. Not to mention the noise and pollution generated by the heavy traffic in that stretch of water. Stressed then is an objective description and not 'a condescending one'. Anyway, the title has been changed now. I don't mind but I don't think adding stressed was unfair, given the details of stress described in the article I have outlined above.

mrlonglong 6y ago

I have a theory - that they know we're taking too much fish out of the seas and they want us to stop.

srean 6y ago

In case it gives some HNers joy, India now recognizes Orcas as non-human person [0]. India is the fourth country in the world to ban the capture and import of cetaceans for the purpose of commercial entertainment - along with Costa Rica, Hungary, and Chile. Me thinks that it is about time. [0] https://www.dw.com/en/dolphins-gain-unprecedented-protection-in-india/a-16834519 https://www.dw.com/en/dolphins-gain-unprecedented-protection...

meowface 6y ago
It seems backwards, to me, and I suspect it will be widely viewed as backwards in the distant future. Why a top-down approach? Countless other species are sentient like orcas are, even if they may not be quite as cognitively adept as orcas at certain tasks or quite as fortunate to receive the same amkunt of marketing and PR. Why is this a default deny policy, with just a few exceptions for the tiny few species we feel hold the relative position of more valuable than other species? If orcas never existed, would they award their runner-up the get-out-of-kill-free card instead? I think it should be the inverse, with extremely rigorous criteria and years of deliberation over which species to exclude, rather than which ones to include. Don't get me wrong, I prefer one over none, but it feels a little bit like Saudi Arabia finally permitting women to drive and then showering them with praise for their admirable feminist ethos. I don't know when the day might come, but I think it's inevitable in the long run that this inverted approach will be what almost everyone does and almost everyone will be absolutely baffled and mortified that it used to be done any other way. I don't know whether or not any of us will live to see that day, but I'm prety confident it'll happen eventually.

aaron695 6y ago

Covid-19 It's causing aassive amount of shark deaths in Australia - https://taronga.org.au/conservation-and-science/australian-shark-attack-file https://taronga.org.au/conservation-and-science/australian-s... This is assuming it's this year this orca phenomenon is happening. Not sure why. I'd start by at looking at engine noise no longer scaring off these predators.

29athrowaway 6y ago

Another interesting phenomenon are the sharks that destroy undersea optical cables.

tus88 6y ago

It begins.

sunstone 6y ago

I believe there was a story some years ago about a sail boat in the pacific, about a day's sail from the Panama Canal that was broken up by a pod of killer whales.

zelphirkalt 6y ago

I can already hear some people cry out: "But they are attacking _our boats_!! We need to do something!" in believe how there is some evil animal out there, simply out to take away their fun. Then they arm themselves up with harpoons, because: "Well, not going to shoot them, _unless_ they attack my boat!! It's only self-defense!" Just like with people, who need to go where polar bears are and arm themselves with rifles, because they might "have no choice" when attacked by starving polar bear. This is so short sighted. For those people, all that counts is their "fun" while on this planet. They pay for some service, that is available and don't feel any responsibility. Perhaps simply don't f* go there and have fun somewhere else?! But no, fun is more important than the life of endangered species, so these kind of tours are still offered. Money can be made. Money, you understand? Omg it's money! It's disgusting and I believe, that no one has the right to shoot a polar bear, even in self-defense. Please simply die, get eaten, instead of killing one of those endangered beings. There are enough humans here, we don't need you and neither does this planet.

rainbowzootsuit 6y ago
"It's coming right for us!" —Uncle Jimbo
userbinator 6y ago
Please simply die You first.

asdasfasdfasdf 6y ago

Good for them.

hevelvarik 6y ago

>This tiny population’s presence is of huge importance, and if human activity is affecting their behaviour, human activity must be regulated. This is thrown in at the end. Why is the presence of 30-50 adult orca distributed over 5 pods in this particular part of the ocean of huge importance?

mikeyouse 6y ago
Apex predators are always of huge importance.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade
- hevelvarik 6y ago
  I’ll read through that article but since the article discusses a general dynamic it’s fair to reason about whether and to what extent that dynamic is in play in a given particular context . It seems that the point of ‘contention’ here is food scarcity and competition for Tuna, and it seems the orca are losing the point and either the humans have acquired the role of apex predator in that particular part of the ocean or at the least the orcas’ services as such are no longer required. It may be that reading this article will provide the wherewithal to answer this question but perhaps there’s someone here who understands the particulars and can shed some light.

zaarn 6y ago

Sounds like the intro of The Swarm, the novel.

gyvastis 6y ago

Nature exists? Surprise, haha