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WILD WATER KINGDOM

Why Orcas Are Attacking Yachts (Again)

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Why Orcas Are Attacking Yachts (Again)
Are they bored, or is this revenge?
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Earlier this year, in May, reports of orcas attacking vessels in the sea, including yachts, started to surface. It's happened in the past, not too long ago, and definitely brought renewed attention to the phenomenon.

On May 2 this year, orcas attacked sailors in the Straight of Gibraltar and on May 5, German magazine Yacht.de reported that a group of three orcas attacked a Swiss sailing yacht by the name of Champagne, damaging and sinking it.



"At first I thought we had rammed something. But then I quickly realized that it was orcas that went on the ship," Champagne skipper Werner Schaufelberger told Yacht.de. The orcas left them with a broken rudder, and eventually Champagne sunk on its way back from the rescue mission. Though Schaufelberger said that it was the first such emergency he witnessed in over 20 years, and according to the German Foundation of Marine Conservation, only three yachts have been lost since July 2020. Experts have been trying to find out why this has been happening.



Here's what experts think.

Back in September 2020, Alfredo López, a biology professor at the Galician NGO Marine Mammal Research Center (CEMMA), said that the killer whales had no intention of attacking people. "It's not revenge,"López told El País at the time. "They're just acting out as a precautionary measure." In later interviews López offered two possible theories.

Meanwhile, experienced underwater photographer Andrew Sutton told the Guardian that an increase in vessels might've caused this reaction from the orcas and said that he's seen them do "weird things" in the Strait of Gibraltar. Another expert, Luke Rendell, from the University of St Andrews, who has studed wild orcas speculated that past trauma could be a cause, but told The Guardian that "curiosity" and "play" could be factors too.

And in a more recent interview, which took place on May 24, 2023, López also shared Rendell's idea, and offered two possible theories in Scientific American: that these attacks were either a new fad among orca subgroups, led by the juveniles, or a response to a past traumatic experience involving a sea vessel.

While experts are still trying to get to the bottom of this behavior, the internet didn't waste a minute turning this frightening debacle into a meme.



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