A dangerous voyage
On the evening of May 4, a yacht was sailing in the Strait of Gibraltar off the coast of Spain. The sea was relatively calm that day, and the slightly swaying hull made Captain Werner Schaufelberger a little drowsy, and in order to stay awake, the captain and crew wanted to drink some wine to wake up, but they chatted too much, apparently a little drunk, so they became even more drowsy.
Suddenly! The yacht shook violently, the captain and crew were awakened, they pressed their beating hearts to the deck to check, and through the searchlight, they were shocked to see an adult killer whale with two smaller killer whales ramming the yacht. Some crew members found that the rudder was no longer controllable, apparently some equipment had been broken. The killer whale attack continued, with the baby killer whale biting the stern rudder while the large killer whale repeatedly retreated and then slammed the side of the ship with the side of the attack.
Captain Werner Schaufelberger immediately sought help from the Spanish Coast Guard, which responded quickly, drove a speedboat to the site of the attack to rescue all the people on board, and later sent a ship to pull the attacked yacht to the port of Barbat, but the ship could not hold on and sank at the entrance of the port.
Killer whale attack
This unusual attack is the third in recent history, the previous case occurred only two days before the above-mentioned case, when the situation was even more horrific, when six killer whales teamed up to attack a sailing ship also in the Strait of Gibraltar, and Greg Blackburn on board recalled seeing a female killer whale seemingly teaching her cubs how to ram the hull and gnaw at the stern rudder, but fortunately when the boat was knocked immobilized, the killer whales left. The Coast Guard rushed to rescue Greg Blackburn before the ship sank.
According to a study published in the journal Marine Mammal Science in June 2022, killer whales have been attacking ships on the Iberian coast since May 2020, and their attacks are only aimed at smaller vessels, and there is a clear pattern of attack, killer whales will approach the vessel from the stern and gnaw the stern rudder, and will hit the hull from time to time, generally as long as the vessel stops moving, they will leave.
Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal who has been studying killer whales, said most of these attacks pose no great threat, with only four shipwrecks in the more than 500 attacks recorded so far, and that killer whales come into contact with only one out of every hundred ships passing through a location.
Why did this happen?
The research team believes that it should be a traumatic event that caused the killer whale's behavior to change, and the specific origin or motive of the killer whale to do so cannot be determined, but it should be that the killer whale experienced a "painful critical moment": being hit by a ship or attacked by a crew, and such an attack on the ship was done in retaliation.
As a social animal, killer whales can easily learn and copy the behavior of other killer whales. In most of these attacks, killer whales rush to the stern rudder of the ship and bite, bend or break the stern rudder, apparently learning from each other to have the same tactics so quickly.
Some researchers believe that frequent fishing robs killer whales of food, which is commonplace. But after two years of epidemics with few humans, killer whales suddenly realized that there was so much food in the ocean without humans! So the retaliatory or defensive behavior of the ships that think it is human beings who are robbing food, attacking ships, and thus appear.
But Deborah Giles, a killer whale researcher at the University of Washington and the nonprofit Wild orca, believes that killer whales may behave just for fun. Killer whales are very curious and very playful species, and for them, this is more like a game, a "fashion", like various "xx challenges" on one of our music apps.
postscript
But most researchers agree that killer whales are not intentionally teaching young killer whales to do this kind of thing, and although the behavior has spread vertically to young people, they only do so by imitating and later spreading horizontally among them.
As incidents continue to occur, this situation gradually becomes a real concern for the safety of sailors and the conservation of this endangered killer whale population. Since the beginning of the anomalous interaction in 2020, four killer whales belonging to a subpopulation in Iberian waters have died, although their deaths cannot be directly linked to the encounter with the vessel, and this possibility cannot be ruled out.
Whatever the real reason, this situation needs attention, not just for killer whales, but also for sailors.