Killer whales launch ‘orchestrated’ attacks on sailing boats

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by Boatyarddog

Thanks Dave.
Most people have watched Aws to many times, so Every Fin is a shark.
Or, a threat
BYD

It is interesting why they don't see us as food. I've seen other similar videos where a mother and calf follow a lone swimmer. It almost appears that they are just inquisitive not aggressive. There are some videos with people on SUPs with the same result. I see people as the ultimate alfa in the world, but without a weapon, we are easy targets.

[Tupaia]

No human deaths will be as result of being eaten but from being shipwrecked and not able to be rescued, drowned or from exposure.

[jtsailjt]

Originally Posted by JAFO

Oh please.

Orcas do NOT eat people. Period.

In fact, the only known human fatalities caused by orca were all committed by individuals that had been raised in captivity, and were certifiably insane (in the opinion of their own handlers!) by virtue of a combination of having had no normal social interactions with others of their own species, and being bored out of their skulls due to being confined in a small area for many years. Hardly surprising that eventually, they lost the plot and managed to kill one of their handlers. (And even then, eating them does not seem to be what they had in mind. At least one case, to my mind, seems to have been an attempt by a lonely, horny (and batshit crazy) juvenile male, to mate with a handler.)

Wild orca have never demonstrated any interest in eating humans, despite many opportunities to do so, and if anything, seem to regard us in much the same way as dolphins do.

Please do some basic fact-checking next time, instead of making assumptions and expressing stupid opinions that do nothing except prove that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.


Exactly! And yet, there are none.

Whether you ultimately get eaten by the Orca that sunk your boat or by hundreds of crabs when you wash up on a beach a month later is a pretty unimportant distinction in my mind. The point is that for reasons we don’t understand these pods off Portugal are a threat to the life of sailors transiting this area and it’s completely appropriate for threatened sailors to take whatever action that seems necessary in order to survive the encounter. If an orca is killed then that’s too bad for the orca but says nothing bad about the sailor that found it necessary to go to that extreme. Of course this is just theoretical because I know of no sailors who carry the necessary means to kill an orca aboard their boat and it seems that simply motoring in reverse causes them to lose interest and leave you alone so killing them is unnecessary. But if motoring in reverse or other peaceful measures didn’t dissuade them from attacking, I doubt that a sailor exists who would hesitate to kill one, if he had that ability, to avoid ending up swimming with them 30 miles offshore whether you think they are likely to eat you or not. While it’s true that humans aren’t normally the preferred food in an orcas diet, orcas also don’t normally intentionally attack and sink sailboats, and yet these orca are doing just that. It seems more than a bit naive to me to assume these abnormally acting orca will start acting like a normal orca after they’ve sunk your boat and you’re in the water with them. Who wants to bet their life on that? Not me.

[Andy_B_1964]

In Greenland they hunt killer whales:


https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north...nges-1.2782297


"hunters will shoot the whale, ideally just behind the blow hole — “It’s a very sensitive place on the whale” — using a .30-06-calibre rifle. Just one whale is taken at a time."

[NaClyDog]

Here is a new report about coordinated "attacks".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcLzjlzKZX0

Interesting hypothesis by the scientists.

[GordMay]

Further to NaClyDog’s Video Report:

Orcas (Orcinus orca) have sunk three boats off the Iberian coast of Europe, and the behaviour seems to be spreading. Biologists first noted the trend in 2020.
They suspect that it is a defensive behaviour, which originated with a traumatized female orca nicknamed ‘White Gladis’, after a "critical moment of agony" (a collision with a boat, or entrapment during illegal fishing), and that the behavior is spreading among the population, through social learning.
Orcas are social creatures, that can easily learn and reproduce behaviorsm performed by others, according to a 2022 study.[1] In the majority of reported cases, orcas have made a beeline for a boat's rudder, and either bitten, bent or broken it.
Iberian orcas are critically endangered, and only 39 were recorded in the last census, in 2011.[2]

Much More about ➥ https://www.livescience.com/animals/...e-same-but-why

[1] “Killer whales of the Strait of Gibraltar, an endangered subpopulation showing a disruptive behavior” ~ by Ruth Esteban et al
$10 + ➥ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...1111/mms.12947

[2] “IUCN Red List”
➥ https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/132948040/132949669

[Tupaia]

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world...n-yacht-attack


Much larger group in this attack (sorry encounter).

[Scorpius]

Originally Posted by Chotu

Yep. Doing a little time in the tank (at Sea World) will show em who’s boss! Ha ha ha

Exactly the place an Orca has killed a human: its trainer at Sea World. The jury is still out: was it deliberate or an accident?

[NaClyDog]

Originally Posted by Scorpius

Exactly the place an Orca has killed a human: its trainer at Sea World. The jury is still out: was it deliberate or an accident?

Maybe if you spent a few years in a cage forced to perform for an audience daily / multiple times per day, you might be able to answer that more easily. It's all good though because you would have been provided room, board and medical so your overloads could make a living.

[Scorpius]

Originally Posted by barnakiel

The theory of orcas trying to shake off their food from the boats makes a lot of sense.



We are over-harvesting their fields, they came to shake us off our boats. Off course to such a big animal we may look like a food of sorts.


I hope nobody gets hurt on either side.



b.

There is no evidence of Orcas in the wild deliberately attacking (or eating) people.

[Scorpius]

Originally Posted by billgewater

But seriously, if an Orca was to attack a whale or dolphin, then the initial attack would probably be designed to immobilize the prey. i.e. attack the tail fin parts. Thus the attack on the rudder. Also from the Orca's perspective, a whale that stays on the surface and is not breaching or exhaling, is hardly moving at all, would reasonably be assumed to be in difficulties and thus an easy prey.

It's a worry when you see pictures of large inflatables moving among the ice floes loaded with rugged tourists, snapping shots of groups of Orcas. A disaster in the making.

There may be some truth to this: immobilize the prey by attaching the tail. We once had a dead sea lion (around 1000 lbs.) wash up on our beach near Pender Harbour. The last 18 to 24" had been bitten off. In the area, only an Orca would be capable of doing that.

[Scorpius]

Originally Posted by El Pinguino

Normal behaviour for Orcas.... unusual diet...

https://www.theguardian.com/environm...bay-california

Lots out there about how they deal with grey whales and their calves.

As stated above they appear to be juveniles.... the elders have that evil looking fin with the floppy top...

Only the big bulls have the very tall fin with the floppy top. Mature females do not - and mature females have been known to get aggressive protecting their young from real or perceived threats.

[Scorpius]

Originally Posted by Maka

The book 'Survive the Savage Sea' is about a boat sunk by Orcas off the Galapagos Islands in 1972.

The boat sank quickly and the crew ended up in a life raft and the dingy.

The Orcas did not bother the people in those smaller vessels.
I recommend the book to all cruisers as it has wonderful ideas for dos and don'ts to survive a sinking.

I recall that, at the time, there were a number of boats attacked by Orcas in the area. Dougall Robertson wrote the book after he, his wife, and four children were attacked, lost their boat and drifted in their liferaft and dinghy for five weeks before being rescued.

After a few years these attacks stopped. Either the specific whales went on to other things or possibly just died of old age and the behaviour died with them.

As I've mentioned before, this is possibly just aberrant behaviour by one or more mentally ill whales. As mammals, we have individuals and groups who indulge in such behaviour (mass shootings, terrorism, etc.). Why can't whales?

[Scorpius]

Originally Posted by dannc

WOW!

We are talking about similar but different incidents!

I am talking about Surviving a Savage Sea, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dougal_Robertson

Which brings up an interesting point. I wonder how many boats that goi missing were sunk by whales. I know this is a strange idea but whales do sink yachts more often than we think.

There was a self reported survey regarding boat and whale collisions years ago. Maybe 10ish years back? What was interesting is that there were about 10 self reported collisions each year on average and about one boat in ten sank on average.

The big problem with the survey is that it was self reported which meant you had to know about it to make a report. And more importantly, survive to make the report if you knew of the survey. I think there are far more collisions between boats and whales than is known. I say that because you will read about collisions in various media including CF and TF and they seem to happen more often than one would think. Or at least I would think.

The link I posted about Surviving A Savage seas, links to another couple who survived for over 100 days in a life raft after the boat was sunk by whales, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauric...Maralyn_Bailey

Steve Callahan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Callahan, thinks his boat was sunk when it hit a whale.

Another link from one of the above links. Never heard of this incident but his boat was capsized by Orcas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrogio_Fogar

I also wonder if more collisions are happening as the whale population recovers.

Later,
Dan

I think you will find that most of these sinkings were the result of boats running into sleeping whales - which then instinctively dove - which involves much thrashing of very large tails. Tristan Jones recounts one such occurrence. The vast majority were NOT whales deliberately "attacking" boats.

[Scorpius]

Originally Posted by NaClyDog

Maybe if you spent a few years in a cage forced to perform for an audience daily / multiple times per day, you might be able to answer that more easily. It's all good though because you would have been provided room, board and medical so your overloads could make a living.

Exactly my point. Maybe I was being too subtle.