Scientists Say One Thing Might Stop Orca Attacking Boats

Scientists believe that orcas attacking boats off the coasts of Spain and Portugal may stop once they get older.

Since 2020, there have been hundreds of interactions between orcas and boats near Spain and Portugal. The encounters have ranged from orcas simply approaching boats to actively interfering with them.

Alfredo Lopez, an orca expert at the Groupo Trabajo Orca Atlantica (GTOA), which is studying the orcas' behavior, told Yachting Monthly that the attacks are mainly stemming from 16 young orcas of the same subpopulation.

Lopez believes the interactions may finally stop once these orcas grow up, and that it is unlikely that this behavior will spread to other orca populations.

Meanwhile, the attacks continue. Luis Rodrigues said in the Facebook group Orca Attack Reporting that he had been sailing off the coast of Sesimbra, Portugal on November 19 when orcas attacked his boat.

The footage showed the whales repeatedly hitting the boat's rudder and causing the boat to shake. The orcas attacked for 45 minutes until help arrived, but at that point, the whales had already managed to snatch the rudder, Rodrigues said.

Some interactions with orcas off the coast of Spain and Portugal have been more serious. Earlier this month, orcas sank a French sailboat after tearing off the rudder and swimming away with it. Orcas also sank another boat in July with five people on board. Nobody so far has been injured as a result of the attacks.

Scientists still don't know what the orcas' reasons are for attacking boats in the area, but they do not believe the orcas are interacting with boats out of aggression. They also think it's a learned behavior.

"It is a behavior that should tend to become extinct as orcas assume different roles than they currently do, given that most of them are juveniles," Lopez told Yachting Monthly.

It is not clear how old these juvenile orcas are, but male orcas tend to reach maturity at around age 25. For females, it tends to be in the early teenage years.

Orcas are a playful species and have previously been observed interacting with boats out of curiosity. It is unclear whether that is what they are doing in the video, but the interactions still prove dangerous due to the whales' large size.

"Local scientists who have worked with killer whales in this region for more than two decades have had closer looks at incidents, and so far I think it is fair to say that we do not know why these accidents and attacks are happening," David Lusseau, professor of marine sustainability at the Technical University of Denmark, previously told Newsweek.

"The individual whales seem to engage in the same pattern of attack, focusing on the rudder which can lead to the vessels being immobilized and needing rescue, or to tragic situations like the most recent accident where the vessel sunk.

"In short, we really don't know; and that's the interesting point for me: we have a species interacting with us in a way we don't understand," Lusseau said. "We project on these interactions all the human emotions we can find, but at the end of the day, they are not humans; they are another species with a very large brain, complex social lives, and [they are] a master problem solver. They have their reason for these attacks, I like to keep an open option that they have their own, alien, reason or motivation which humans can't understand."