Something is happening with orcas at sea - The attacks are spreading

Something strange has been happening in the waters around Spain and Portugal for. The last three years. Orcas off the coast of Spain and Portugal have been body slamming boats, chewing off their rudders, dozens damaged over the past couple of years. Raising questions about why the orcas are doing it. In April of 2023. The people aboard a. Catamaran near the Strait of Gibraltar suddenly felt that their boat had taken a hard hit from a wave. But this? Was no wave. They were under attack from orcas in just 15 minutes. The pod ripped both rudders off the boat. Forcing the vessel to limp back to. Shore. Barely. Functioning a month later, the sailing vessel Mustique was making a similar crossing when for over an hour. Orcas repeatedly struck the. Vessel ripping the boat. Apart. Piece by piece, everyone aboard had to be rescued and the boat sank while it was being towed to shore. The orcas in this area are systematically attacking boats. Since May of 2020, there have been over 500 instances of orcas interacting with boats, sinking three of them and disabling many more around the Strait of. Gibraltar Which? Connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, and recently it seems like the attacks might be spreading, with boaters much further north reporting attacks. It's exactly the kind of story that makes the perfect Internet meme, whether it's indigenous creators making orca stickers with the slogan Be a Problem Money Can't Solve or the orcas alongside A sickle and hammer proclaiming Eat the. Rich. It's clear. That the orca. Attacks have ignited something in our moment feelings of frustration over wealth inequality and fears for the future of the planet due to climate change and human pollution. It's almost like we want to think that the orcas are taking revenge on humans for messing up their pristine. Waters but. Can orcas actually do revenge? Some marine mammal researchers. Say this. Is just another case of anthropomorphizing. Maybe we're projecting because some of us feel like we as a species. Deserve it. Then again, orcas are incredibly intelligent and highly. Social creatures. And we know that they can learn and respond to their environment, so maybe they are trying to send us a message. Back off. Stop invading all of our habitats. Clean up your ACT. But unless we manage to find a way to directly communicate with the killer whales, we'll never know for sure. But the deeper. You dive into orca behavior, the more it becomes apparent that they deeply understand their environment and will take matters into their own fins if necessary. For the people whose. Boats have been attacked by the orcas. It's clear that the encounters can be. Incredibly scary. Just consider the size. Of the boats versus the size of the orcas. The researchers. Looking at these incidents, say that the average boat that they're attacking is 12 meters long, while a full grown orca can be over 9 meters long. Just imagine being out at sea, your vessel. Hit repeatedly by a huge creature with sharp teeth. That's known for things like murdering sharks. To eat their. Livers and beating baby seals to death. It's happened to sailors on racing vessels and even happened to one man multiple times on different boats since he works to transport vessels around to. Different locations. The orcas seem to be especially fond of attacking the rudders. Which work to steer the boats. This particular population of orcas doing the attacks is known as the Iberian subpopulation, and it had only 39 members based on a census from 2011, making them critically endangered. Orcas are incredibly unique in that their subpopulations around the world can behave in vastly different ways to one another, but we'll get more into that shortly for this. Particular group. Researchers know that they migrate based on the movement of their favorite prey, Atlantic bluefin tuna, and that means they're often in close contact with human fishers. But the area is. Also popular with. Sailboats. Because it's the entrance to the Mediterranean, so there are a. Lot of. Recreational vessels, too. Researchers have even identified one adult female in particular who seems to be involved in a large number of the attacks. Her name is White Gladys, and scientists speculate that she may have been injured by fishing gear at some point, and her negative experiences are thus driving the attacks. Based on the scars on the whales of her pod, we know that some of them have had negative experiences with boats and Nets. The other killer whales who? Repeatedly go. After sailboats. Are juveniles and some scientists think this might be an example of playful behavior or sensory stimulation in different parts of the world. Orcas are known to rub themselves on smooth pebbles near the shoreline perhaps. Because they. Just enjoy the sensation. Maybe it simply feels great to rub up on a boat and RIP it apart. Like a dog shreds. A dog toy plus orcas are. Also aggravated by. Boats in plenty of other parts of the world, but have yet to start an attack campaign anywhere outside of the North Atlantic. But it's not like it never happens. Elsewhere there. Are a handful of accounts of orcas attacking small vessels over the past few decades and even centuries. In 1972, a pod of orcas rammed a family sailboat. Called the. Lucette around the Galapagos Islands, ultimately sinking it, though they didn't attack the life raft that the family escaped onto. But even further back in time is the story. Of the whale ship Essex. Which was sunk by a sperm whale when the crew escaped into a lifeboat. They were then attacked by an orca that nearly smashed that vessel to pieces. So what exactly? Is going on in the minds of these animals. There are a. Surprising number of similarities between orcas and humans we're both apex predators and highly social mammals who have spread to all corners of our. Respective globes. For orcas, that means every single ocean and sea, and for humans that means pretty much all terrestrial land masses, and both species have distinct cultural groups. Or in the case of orcas, ecotypes, that means in different locations. Matrilineal groups of orcas will behave in distinct ways, whether it's in the type of hunting they do or the foods that they eat. Take the example of the Pacific Northwest. There are multiple orca ecotypes in the region. Some eat mammals while. Others eat fish, while others. Still hunt only in the deep sea. They also have their own distinctive calls, markings, body shapes and. Other behaviors. That can sometimes verge on the bazaar. In 1987, a female orca was spotted wearing a dead salmon around its nose. For whatever reason, the surrounding orcas decided. That this was the. Look for the season and multiple orcas from the trendsetter's pod, plus others in the area started sporting dead. Fish hats. The fad only lasted for that summer, but it clearly shows that there can be cultural sharing within and beyond orca pods. We also have a history going back. Decades of. Capturing orcas from the wild and bringing them into aquariums and many times they seem to form bonds with the humans, learning from them and from other captive. Orcas as. If they were making their own new cultural practices, one example is when orcas captured near Iceland shared a pool with an orca who was captured off the coast of Washington state. When human performers worked with the orcas, they noted that the orcas seem to have coordinated together for. How to? Behave trainers also saw instances of dominant orcas receiving fish rewards from other members of the pod, though they didn't hear any vocalizations from the dominant orca, suggesting there was some kind of communication that happened earlier. And yet, some orcas also have exhibited aggression towards their trainers, from dragging them underwater to biting them hard enough to break the bone and sometimes killing them. These seem more like isolated incidents than patterns, but. Are these cases of the? Orcas fighting back against. Their captors. Were they doing something like what the wild orcas are doing off the coast of Spain? Taking revenge Whether or not we can say definitively if wild animals are motivated to take revenge on humans, it's clear that their attacks are becoming more and more frequent. Multiple studies have found that large carnivore attacks on humans are becoming more common, partly because humans are expanding into their territories and partly because climate change is creating more. Resource scarcity. And pushing animals beyond their normal ranges. These attacks come from all sorts of animals in many different climates. Polar bears. Grizzly bears. Sub-saharan lions and mountain lions. In these cases, experts don't think it's so much a case of animals taking revenge. It's more that they're encountering humans more frequently than they ever have in the past. While orcas are also. Large carnivores. They're not attacking the humans after they sink the boats. There's been no no injuries so far, despite the number of vessels that have encountered. These aggressive. Pods. Are there attacks just a side effect of human vessels coming into their territory more frequently than in the past? Or do they understand something about the fact that boats carry people and they're targeting our stuff even if they're not targeting us? Unfortunately, there's no clear answer to this mystery. But there is more to the story of the relationship between humans and orcas beyond the recent attacks beyond SeaWorld, Free Willy or Blackfish. A story. That took place in the early 1900s. That further illustrates the minds of orcas, their capacity for friendship with humans, and what happens when they feel betrayed. The story of the Orcas of Eden is fascinating and heart wrenching and is about how orcas and humans worked together to hunt off the coast of Australia for many years. Never has there been such an example of orca human cooperation before or since. What drives 2 apex predators from entirely different ecosystems to work together? This story of the Orcas of Eden is so incredible that I made another full length video about it that you can watch now on Nebula. Nebula is a streaming platform that we built for exactly this reason, to explore topics more deeply, sometimes in new formats and sometimes within subject areas that don't exactly fit our main YouTube channel. This video about the Orcas of Eden mixes history with science, but it's a topic I simply could not resist making a video about Nebula allows me to take risks like this and. Experiment more. Whether it's this historical Orca video or the Nebula original series I made called Becoming Human about the incredible story of how we came to understand human evolution, Nebula is a place for all of its creators to make experimental and new content. Like Joe Scott's Mysteries of the Human Body, which takes you through some of the most baffling diseases and epidemics from history, or Wendover Productions Extremities, which shows you why and how people live in Earth's most isolated and extreme settlements. 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