Orcas are acting weird. Off the coast of Gibraltar, sailors say they’re “attacking” sailboats—specifically, slamming the sides of boats and pulling off rudders—rendering the vessels helpless in the water. Around U.S. shores, they’re showing up in unusual numbers this summer in Monterey Bay and off the coast of Nantucket.
All of this has Instagram’s most prolific Canva slideshow artists and ecosocialist Twitter meme accounts very excited, and it’s an appealing idea: At first glance, nature sure does seem to be fighting back, defending itself after decades of abuse by the shipping, fishing, and military industries. Killer whales have a lot to be bitter about, and few humans would fault them for plotting revenge.
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Orcas are intelligent and complicated creatures, much like humans, so their actions can be difficult to interpret with definitive answers. But this isn’t brand-new behavior. They’ve been doing this for years, according to sailors and documented in a study published in the journal Marine Mammal Science in 2022 that looked at orca behavior in the Strait of Gibraltar.
Boat captain Dan Kriz, whose boat rudder was destroyed by orcas in 2020, was on board one of the boats that orcas hit in April. “We were about to cross shipping lines and turn south to Canary Islands when we felt like we got hit bad with a wave, but with the second hit, we realized that the same situation from 2020 was happening,” he told Newsweek. “My first reaction was, ‘Please! Not again.’ There is not much one can do. They are very powerful and smart.”
Kriz’s deja-vu nightmare is kind of hilarious, but his encounter with these creatures and many media outlets’ framing of them as “attacks” motivated “by revenge” spawned a months-long news cycle that launched a thousand memes.
The theory that’s making the most headlines after this recent spate of encounters comes from that study: that the orcas could be responding to a traumatizing event involving a boat in the region.
“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,” study co-author López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, told Live Science. One mature female orca that the researchers named White Gladis may have experienced a “critical moment of agony,” he said. “That traumatized orca is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat.”
The majority of scientists agree, however, that these whales likely are not in their revenge era, but are engaging in the underwater equivalent of a hot new trend.
I called a few orca conservationists to ask them how they feel about the unfolding “orca uprising.” Online, the animals they’ve devoted their careers to are suddenly anarchist memes and Lisa Frank memes that say “SINK BOATS KILL HUMANS RESTORE BALANCE,” but in real life, they’re just fucking with expensive human toys—something that usually doesn’t end well for the natural world.
“I get nervous because I am worried that people will take the situation into their own hands and use lethal or harmful tactics to try and, you know, get the whales to stop or at least you know, stop an attack at the moment,” Deborah Giles, science and research director at Wild Orca, a group working with Southern Resident killer whales, told me.
“What I think is probably happening is, it’s a playful behavior. It’s a social behavior,” Giles said. It could have been started by a young whale and was passed around within its social circle, she said, and is catching on in the area.
The trauma response theory doesn’t make a lot of sense to her, she said: “Number one, if that was the case, then they would be ‘attacking’ fishing boats. And they’re not. They’re very targeted on boats with keels, and it seems like they’re not even interested in motor boats.” Keels are long fin-like blades that run the length of the bottom of sailboats; orcas have been known to grab onto dorsal fins of other members of their pods to playfully hitch rides, Giles explained.
Monica Bacchus, marine programs coordinator at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Killer Whale Research and Conservation Program, isn’t ruling out the trauma theory, but also said that orcas, like humans, have their own cultures that are often unique to their own pods.
“Just like people, they communicate with each other and they spread information to other members of their pods, and other pods in nearby areas,” she said. “So it’s definitely something that’s been spreading, information-wise, for a while.”
Something people on vessels that had these encounters have reported is a sense of power and deliberate action from these creatures. One sailor who experienced one such encounter said “They [hit] us repeatedly … giving us the impression that it was a coordinated attack,” according to NPR.
If a pod wanted to do serious damage, it could. They’re smart and powerful enough to really rise up, if that’s what they intended. “If whales really wanted to do that, I think that would happen. I think that they would do it, if they wanted to. We’re not seeing that,” Bacchus said. But in the few cases that have occurred since 2020, they’ve mostly lost interest after messing with a sailboat for a while, according to Live Science. “It has to do with just the rudder and the boat, but it’s not like they’re coming out of the water and you know, taking humans off the boat. It’s not like a megalodon situation.”
If anything, killer whales are more benevolent and forgiving than they are spiteful, making their name a bit of a misnomer. A deadly orca attack on humans has never been documented. Giles reminded me of the whales targeted in the past by the captive whale industry, including the killer whales of the Pacific Northwest during the 60’s and 70’s, who experienced unbelievable cruelty at the hands of humans. One whale’s mother was shot in front of him and then harpooned, Giles said, and dragged across miles of ocean, but he never attacked the humans who did this, and neither did the pod who would have witnessed it all.
“If any population of killer whales we know has a reason for vengeance, if you will, it would have been this population. And yet we have never seen any aggression whatsoever towards vessels or people,” Giles said. “I do think that that’s important to remember and put that in the context of who these animals are as a species.”
“I think that this is an instance where we can really see how we are not so different from the animals that live in the ocean or even on land, or the animals that we see every day.”
Interactions between people and wild animals are expected, Giles said, but minimizing impact on their environment is still crucial. “I think that an important aspect of this is to recognize that these boats are in these whales’ living rooms, in their kitchens,” Giles said. “We’re in their space, and finding ways to coexist with them I think is what I would encourage people there to do.”
I asked Bacchus: Are you worried about whales doing this, for their own safety? “We’re definitely not worried about it,” she said. “It’s not something new, we’ve seen this before. I mean, the book Moby Dick? This is something that’s happened throughout the course of history. It’s just happening again, like trends, they resurface themselves.” Behavioral scientists find it all fascinating, and they’re keeping an eye on it, but right now it’s a wait-and-see situation.
“It’s always cool to see animals do new things,” Bacchus said. “I think that this is an instance where we can really see how we are not so different from the animals that live in the ocean or even on land, or the animals that we see every day.”
But because they’re so relatably clever, they make an easy canvas to project our deepest fears about the future onto, and our most joyful, chaotic fantasies for how we’d like to take control of it. And because humans are storytelling creatures, we look for analogs in the natural world to project our anxieties about things like wealth inequality or the very real destruction of the planet. Lately, we happen to find it in these animals. But the orcas can’t save us—or themselves—from any of that.
If we’re dreaming of killer whale revenge, we can also imagine that the orcas, with their sophisticated communication skills, are telling each other stories about what the people freaking out about their rudder games are doing up there—and waiting anxiously for the next chapter of the human uprising, too.
