If you’ve been on the internet in recent months, it’s likely you’ve seen that reports of orca attacks have spiked.

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. More recently, in an interview with Newsweek, one skipper named Captain Dan Kriz said that he first experienced an orca attack back in 2020 near Gibraltar, and was ambushed by killer whales again in April 2023. “My first reaction was, ‘Please! Not again’,” he said. 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 last month alone.

So what’s the deal? Most of the boats targeted have been sailboats or yachts – does this suggest that the orcas are comrades, collectively taking direct action to bring down their capitalist oppressors? Are they taking requests – can they do Jeff Bezos’ yacht next? Or is this Avatar 2 – where Payakan, a (whale-adjacent) Tulkun, gets revenge on the whalers who killed his fellow Tulkuns – come to life?

According to one scientist, the ambushes could be acts of revenge. Speaking to Live Science, Alfredo López Fernandez, a marine biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, explained that the recent attacks possibly occurred after a female orca called White Gladis suffered a “critical moment of agony” such as a collision with a boat or entrapment during illegal fishing, which triggered her aggressive behaviour. 

Orca society is matriarchal, so evidently, when White Gladis – an adult female – warned her pod of the dangers posed by boats, they sat their whale asses down and listened. She appears to have taught other adult orcas how to attack a boat, with these adult orcas going on to teach their own children the same skills. 15 of the region’s 35 killer whales are said to be responsible, with the orcas damaging boats by biting, bending, and breaking off their rudders. 

Speaking to Dazed, Dr Luke Newell, who researches learning, behaviour, and communication among marine mammals at the University of St Andrews, says it’s “plausible” that White Gladis had a traumatic experience with a boat and subsequently taught other orcas to attack boats. It’s well-documented that orcas love to follow trends: Dr Newell suggests that this new anti-boat movement is similar to the behavioural fad which swept the orca world in 1987, where an orca it-girl started wearing striking hats made of dead salmon, inspiring two other killer whale pods to copy the trend. He also cites an instance where one female dolphin taught other bottlenose dolphins to ‘tail-walk’ (where a dolphin the upper half of its body vertically out of the water and ‘walks’ backwards by flapping its tail – it’s very sweet). 

Additionally, while Dr Newell says he has “no knowledge of an orca ever attacking a boat in this way in any other context”, he stresses that it’s not unusual for them to work collectively (socialist queens). “See, for example, the incredible Frozen Planet footage of them working together to move a seal-bearing ice-floe out to clear water and then taking the seal” (RIP seal 🕯️). 

However, we shouldn’t get too carried away by the idea of a female-led, anti-capitalist, pro-climate justice gang of orca revolutionaries. Dr Newell also stresses that it’s impossible to give a truly definitive answer to why the orcas are behaving this way. “Any answer to the ‘why’ question is inherently and unavoidably speculative and anyone claiming to know for sure isn't credible,” he says.

He suggests that orcas’ natural inquisitiveness could potentially be a more likely explanation for why they’ve started attacking boats. “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. 

But that’s not all. Last week, around 30 killer whales were spotted in Monterey Bay, with no explanation as to why so many had gathered there. And just days ago, scientists reported spotting four killer whales swimming together off the coast of Massachusetts – an incredibly rare sighting, as the only killer whale regularly seen in the area is ‘Old Thom’, who is known to swim around by himself (an introverted king). The scientists also spotted nearly 150 other whales and dolphins during their flight over the ocean, including 23 fin whales, 20 humpback whales, five minke whales and 62 bottlenose dolphins. 

Are whales and dolphins unionising? Is a marine mammal revolution imminent? Is this unusual behaviour a harbinger of the apocalypse, as this astrologer thinks? Sadly, no. Dr Newell believes these events in the ocean around the US are “completely unconnected” to the anti-boat orca movement around Gibraltar.

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