![]() “These are cultural beings,” says Barbara J King, professor emerita of anthropology at the College of William & Mary, Virginia, and author of Animals’ Best Friends. Social learning – from each other – is well documented in orca culture and, yes, “culture” is how behavioural science describes it. They’ve also mimicked sea lions, and some pods engage in “greeting ceremonies”, described as like “a killer whale mosh pit”. As Mustill explains, a number of observed orca fads are not obviously examples of “adaptive” behaviour (meaning “useful”) – most famously the one for wearing salmon as hats. The fibreglass hulls of sailing boats might just feel nice – and orcas enjoy the sensory feedback: some Canadian pods seem to enjoy rubbing themselves on smooth pebbles ( you can watch them on a webcam) or it might just be a trend. Orcas nudge rudder of yacht near Gibraltar – video They could just start eating swimmers all over the place.” “They’re tremendously powerful, incredibly intelligent, incredibly well organised if that species wanted to do anything with us in the ocean, they could.” There are no reported instances of wild orcas killing people, but, says Mustill: “If killer whales wanted to start attacking people, disabling small vessels is a very strange way of going about that. Hoare experienced his own orca interaction in Sri Lanka, when a small pod head-butted and charged his boat: “I have never been so excited and so fearful in my life,” he tells me. That’s a popular hypothesis that Philip Hoare, the author of Leviathan and Albert and the Whale, broadly supports. “It could be a curious and playful behaviour,” suggests the 2021 report from the Grupo Trabajo Orca Atlántica (GTOA, or Atlantic Orca Working Group), a partnership of Spanish and Portuguese scientists. “When we step outside our rush to project, it’s actually very reflective of where we’re at with cetacean sciences: we’re starting to understand that they’re so complicated and nuanced, and that individuals are very different from one another.” Even if we’re in the conscious incompetence phase of learning about orca behaviour, there are expert theories. “What I think is most exciting about this is that actually, we don’t know at all,” says Tom Mustill, a biologist and film-maker, who wrote How to Speak Whale, after a humpback whale landed on his kayak (the jaw-dropping footage is on YouTube). The first question is easier to answer, or rather not to answer: we don’t know what they’re doing or why. But how wrong is that, and why does it appeal? If killer whales wanted to start attacking people, they could just start eating swimmers all over the place “What if we kissed while watching the orcas take back the ocean,” reads one tweet with 1m views, while a much-used image of an arm holding a microphone up to a captive orca has been repurposed endlessly to highly entertaining effect – I like one where it’s “singing” a bespoke version of the Meredith Brooks classic: “I’m a bitch / I’m an orca / Sinking yachts /Just off Majorca / I’m a sinner I’m a whale / Imma hit you with my tail.” We’re taking great pleasure in projecting extremely human narratives and motivations on orcas. Browsing through orca memes, there’s an orca as the sickle in the hammer and sickle, with the headline “eat the rich”, and a Soviet-style graphic of a heroic orca emerging under a superyacht. Why do we like this story so much? Because we do: people – including me – love the idea of orcas attacking boats. First, of course, what are the orcas doing? But the second is about another species entirely: us. IPad 3, iPad 4, iPad Air, iPad iPad, iPad Mini 2, iPad Mini 3, iPad Mini 4, 9.There are two fascinating things about this. ![]() IPhone 12 Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPhone 14 Plus: 1284x2778 IPhone Xs Max, iPhone 11 Pro Max: 1242x2688 IPhone X, iPhone Xs, iPhone 11 Pro: 1125x2436 ![]() IPhone 6 plus, iPhone 6s plus, iPhone 7 plus, iPhone 8 plus: 1242x2208 IPhone 6, iPhone 6s, iPhone 7, iPhone 8: 750x1334 IPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, iPhone SE: 640x1136 IPhone: iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS: 320x480 ![]()
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