
Orcas striking sailing boats in the Straits of Gibraltar - oska
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/13/the-tale-of-the-killer-whales
======
srean
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...](https://www.dw.com/en/dolphins-gain-unprecedented-protection-
in-india/a-16834519)

~~~
meowface
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.

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Ccecil
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
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
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.

------
echelon
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.

~~~
dj_mc_merlin
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.

~~~
stupendousyappi
They don't attack us because it would waste calories and risk injury in
exchange for nothing.

~~~
rv-de
They specifically remove the liver of sharks and ignore the rest ... they
could do that with humans, too.

~~~
cgriswald
A great white shark's liver is huge, heavy, and oily. I'm not sure an orca
could physically even accomplish the task of separating out a human liver and
if it did, it sure wouldn't be satisfying.

------
stupendousyappi
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
In your first paragraph, you might be humanising the beasts quite too much.

~~~
TeaDrunk
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.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Why are humans that catch the food they need to survive total assholes, but
the oracs who need to catch the food they need to survive are not total
assholes?

~~~
daseiner1
if orcas were successfully depriving us of food rather than the other way
around, we would view them as assholes

------
jariel
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
Assuming you're taking about a Beluga in Norway, that whale was likely trained
by the Russian military to do something vaguely similar.

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aazaa
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.

~~~
Tiktaalik
> 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
> “several” from “never”

TFA: In 1972 the Robertson family from Staffordshire were shipwrecked off the
Galapagos Islands after an orca strike (their book, Survive the Savage Sea
became a classic).

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

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RandyRanderson
They are probably orca-hestrated attacks...

~~~
notduncansmith
It takes guts to go for such a stretched auditory pun via text, kudos to you

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sunstone
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.

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aaron695
Covid-19

It's causing aassive amount of shark deaths in Australia -

[https://taronga.org.au/conservation-and-
science/australian-s...](https://taronga.org.au/conservation-and-
science/australian-shark-attack-file)

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.

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

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darksaints
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.

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hevelvarik
>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
Apex predators are always of huge importance..

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade)

~~~
hevelvarik
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.

------
rdiddly
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?

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bambax
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
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.

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29athrowaway
Another interesting phenomenon are the sharks that destroy undersea optical
cables.

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zaarn
Sounds like the intro of The Swarm, the novel.

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gyvastis
Nature exists? Surprise, haha

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ManuelKiessling
Gangs of Gibraltar.

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tus88
It begins.

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bmurphy1976
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
How would you know though?

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hirundo
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
More than likely the noise of the boats is what is enraging the Orcas.

~~~
hirundo
Except such aggressive orcas are new while boat noises aren't. And some of
these incidents are with sailboats.

~~~
tssva
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".

