Why are orcas sinking boats in Spain?

Orcas have been targeting and sinking boats off the coast of Spain, and scientists aren’t quite sure why.

Orcas (Orcinus orca) otherwise known as killer whales have sunk three boats off the Iberian coast of Europe in the last few years, and this naughty behavior towards humans and their watercraft seems to be spreading. It’s as though one mad orca is teaching the others how to revenge role-play.

Biologists first noted the trend happening in 2020 and back then they suspected it to be a defensive behavior, which started with a female orca nicknamed White Gladis after she experienced an unknown trauma. She may have been trapped in a fishing net or hit by a boat.

Iberian orcas are critically endangered, and only 39 were recorded in the last census, in 2011. 

On May 25, orcas severely damaged a sailing boat off the coast of Spain, according to local maritime rescue service said on Thursday, adding to the list of dozens of orca attacks on vessels recorded so far this year on Spanish and Portuguese coasts. 

In the recent attack a group of orcas broke the rudder and pierced through the hull of a sailing boat on its way to Gibraltar. The crew of four contacted Spanish authorities for help, a spokesman for the maritime rescue service said.

Is the mother teaching her calves?

“There were two smaller and one larger orca,” skipper Werner Schaufelberger told the German publication Yacht. “The little ones shook the rudder at the back while the big one repeatedly backed up and rammed the ship with full force from the side.” 

In 2022, there were 207 reports of orca attacks, with 20 reports in the month of May this year alone.

Scientists speculate that a traumatized orca started assaulting boats after a “critical moment of agony” and that this behavior is being taught to other orcas among the population through social learning. In fewer words: orcas are teaching “it’s payback time.”

After 500 attacks starting in 2020 there have been 3 sunken ships.

“The reports of interactions have been continuous since 2020 in places where orcas are found, either in Galicia or in the Strait,” says orca researcher Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal and a representative of the Atlantic Orca Working Group.

“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, who authored a paper about the behavior, said. 

“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,” he added, noted that this can be a “fad” behavior that may just pass in time.

In other maritime events, the rare monk seal sighting in Israel continues. Yulia left Jaffa and was last see in Rishon, south of the city of Tel Aviv.

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