The orcopalypse is nigh: orca revolution enters British waters

Summer 2023 really is shaping up to be the summer of the orca. In recent months, we’ve heard reports of anti-capitalist orcas attacking yachts near Gibraltar, and now it seems as though the orca revolution has spread to the seas around the UK.

Earlier this week, an orca attacked a yacht sailing in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland by repeatedly slamming into the vessel.

“I said: ‘Shit!’”, Wim Rutten, a retired Dutch physicist who was captaining the ship while fishing for mackerel, told The Guardian, adding that he had heard about the other orca attacks near the Iberian coast. “What I felt [was] most frightening was the very loud breathing of the animal,” he said.

The orca continually rammed the boat, sending “soft shocks” through the hull, before dropping back and trailing the vessel as if “looking for the keel”. Rutten says the whale then disappeared but came back “at fast speed, twice or thrice ... and circled a bit.”

This sort of behaviour is normally unusual, but there has been a spate of orca attacks in recent months. Aggressive encounters were first recorded back in 2020, but according to the orca research group GTOA, orca-boat interactions off the Iberian coast jumped from 52 in 2020 to more than 200 in 2022. Notably, in May, an apparently coordinated orca attack sank three boats off the Iberian coast, and it’s estimated that around 20 ambushes have taken place in the area in the last month alone.

Speaking to Dazed earlier this month, Dr Luke Newell, who researches learning, behaviour, and communication among marine mammals at the University of St Andrews, explained that it’s “plausible” an orca named White Gladis had a traumatic experience with a boat, and subsequently taught other orcas to attack boats. Orcas are well-known to start and follow trends – one notable behavioural fad swept the orca world in 1987, where one started wearing striking hats made of dead salmon, inspiring two other killer whale pods to copy the trend.

Dr Newell also suggested that this new behavioural development could simply be an expression of orcas’ natural inquisitiveness. “I think it is more likely a result of curiosity-driven interaction with objects in their environment, perhaps combined with a struggle to find their main food, tuna, that prompts exploration of other potential food sources and leads to these types of interactions,” he says. 

Scientists say it’s unlikely that this boat-ramming ‘trend’ has spread all the way from the Strait of Gibraltar to the North Sea, but it’s not impossible. “I’d be reluctant to say it cannot be learned from [the southern population],” Dr Conor Ryan, a marine biologist and a scientist advisor for the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust, told The Guardian. He added that “it’s possible that this ‘fad’ is leapfrogging through the various pods [and] communities” and explained that “highly mobile pods that could transmit this behaviour a long distance”.

Is this just a ‘fad’ which will soon die out? Or will orcas only been satisfied once their wealthy oppressors have been toppled? Only time will tell, but I wish the orcas well in all their socialist-coded endeavours.

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