This past week’s new reports of orca interactions off the Iberian coast has cast new light on these apex predators. Are they annoyed with us? Or just playing? Whatever the truth, such interactions – a word most scientists prefer to the judgmental “attacks” – are nothing new.
Diving in the Indian Ocean in 2017 with underwater photographer Andrew Sutton, we watched two pods of orca preying on sperm whale calves. Their attempts were defeated by adult whales who had gathered around to defend their young. The orcas then turned their attention to our 6m fishing boat, circling us, before repeatedly ramming our prow. Five of the orcas swam directly at our side, creating a compression wave as if to tip us over.
Afterwards Kathryn Jeffs, director of David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet, told me it was the same technique used by orcas in the Antarctic to prey on seals by flipping them off ice floes – her own crew experienced similar behaviour from a pod of orca frustrated “after a particularly spectacular seal hunt”. Even more remarkably, as my marine biologist colleague Jeroen Hoekendijk notes, the Sri Lanka orcas were using it in equatorial waters where it could have no practical application. So far as we know.
Having been in the water with those orca – and having rapidly got out – I felt the whole encounter was an echo of the first cetacean I ever saw as a boy – indeed, the first most of us ever see. It was a male orca named Ramu, in the so-called Royal Windsor Dolphinarium, as if the animal were the personal possession of the queen. The site is now home to Legoland. The captive animal went through a kind of circus act – heading a ball, catching fish in his beak – that made me realise how humans could get things so wrong. Earlier this year, in an echo of Free Willy, the Miami Seaquarium announced it was to release Lolita, an orca kept captive for more than 50 years – although she is now too old to be freed and will have to spend her retirement in a sea pen.
In our encounter with wild orcas off Sri Lanka, the intense presence of these graphic, glossy black and white animals, so perfect that they almost appeared animatronic, seemed a kind of vindication of their beauty.
Sentient, matriarchal, tremendously successful as a species, their culture is much older than ours, and the recent reports of orca interactions off the Iberian peninsula force us to readdress the power of these marine mammals on our imagination: on what these animals represent and what they are thinking when they interact with us. We’ll probably never know, unless we learn to translate their whistles and clicks. But their actions do have a historical precedent.
Early modern accounts of orca, or killer whales, saw them as sea demons. Olaus Magnus’s 1539 description appears almost prophetic in light of the current news stories: “An Orca is like a Hull turned inside outward; a Beast with fierce Teeth, with which, as with the Stem of a Ship, he rends the Whales Guts and tears his Calves body, he quickly runs and drives him up and down.”
Twenty years later, the orca suddenly comes into focus in a remarkably realistic, almost god-like image – save for the odd whiskers – of an animal stranded in Hartlepool, as illustrated in Conrad Gessner’s Historiae Animalium of 1558.
In all these incarnations, orca are seen as ravenous hunters: indeed, their early species name, Orca gladiator, reflected this pugilistic sensibility.
Whales had yet to acquire their modern status as emblems of environmental threat. The greatest foundation myth of whales of our time was the sinking of the Essex in the Pacific in 1820. The Nantucket whaleship was struck twice by a sperm whale, holing it and causing it to sink, and setting the crew adrift in boats.
The story became the inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and was subsequently re-imagined in Nathaniel Philbrick’s bestselling book, filmed as In The Heart of the Sea starring Cillian Murphy and Ben Whishaw.
Imagine, then, the consternation of the captain, whose ship had been sunk by one species of cetacean, only to find a 3.5m orca – which he called a “killer-fish” – following their flimsy boat. Suddenly the animal “made an unprovoked attack … with his jaws … After having struck the boat once, he continued to play with her, on every side, as if manifesting a disposition to renew the attack, and did a second time strike the bows of the boat, and split her stem”. The crew had to beat off the orca with a pole – only to end up eating six of their shipmates when their rations ran out.
Orcas continued to lurk at the edges of human oceanic experience the further we encroached into their territory. Robert Falcon Scott, leading his expedition to the South Pole in 1911, wrote in his journal of “a most extraordinary scene” as “some six or seven killer whales” appeared off an ice floe ahead of their ship, the Terra Nova.
The expedition photographer, Herbert Ponting, and two of their dogs were on the floe as Scott and his crew watched it “heaved up and split” as the orcas “rose under the ice and struck it with their backs”. Both man and dogs managed to escape that day, and it was clear to Scott that “the whales shared our astonishment” as their “hideous heads shot vertically into the air with …their small glistening eyes, and their terrible array of teeth … There cannot be a doubt that they looked up to see what had happened to Ponting and the dogs”.
Scott – whose son, Peter, went on to become one of Britain’s greatest naturalists – thought that “they would undoubtedly snap up anyone who was unfortunate to fall into the water”. But he had to admit that their actions “were a revelation to us. It is clear that they are endowed with singular intelligence, and in future we shall treat that intelligence with every respect”.
More recently, in 1971, an English family, the Robertsons, sailing around the world, had to abandon ship in the mid-Pacific after a pod of three orca hit their yacht. “Suddenly there was an ear-splintering crash, and the boat jolted three times,” Douglas Robertson, then 18 years old, recalled. “Bang, bang, bang, like that, and the boat was lifted out of the water.”
The incident shows that such contacts are as dangerous for orcas as they are for humans. Douglas Robertson reported that the large male of the pod had “his head split open, and blood was pouring out into the sea”; he believed the orcas might have “attacked us for food purposes, thinking we were a whale”.
Briefly thrown into the water, Robertson thought he was going to be eaten by the orca, and kept feeling for his legs to check they were still there. It took 37 days before the family were rescued from their dinghy.
In 1984, Henk van de Weg, a Dutch sailor participating in the Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race – sponsored by this newspaper – experienced an equally traumatic incident in the mid-Atlantic when an orca struck his homemade yacht like “a terribly large sledgehammer”, leaving him shipwrecked 186 miles from the US east coast. He was subsequently rescued and brought to Cape Cod.
Now the recent interactions off Spain and Portugal appear to be spreading north. In June Wim Rutten, a retired Dutch physicist sailing east of the Shetland Islands, felt an orca ram his boat “with a soft thud”. Rutten heard the “very loud breathing of the animal” as it “came at fast speed, twice or thrice”. “Maybe he just wanted to play,” Rutten said. “Or look me in the eyes.”
Where will it end? Many scientists think the interactions are a fad among a small group of orcas and should be allowed to run its course. It is telling that no one has been harmed in these incidents, and indeed there is only one well-documented case, from 1972, of a human getting injured by an orca in the wild. Those orcas in the Indian Ocean could have done what they liked with us.
In waters now so noisy, so overfished, and so overheated, it’s clear that it is not people the orcas are interested in. It’s the effects of what we do in their seas.
Prof Philip Hoare is a writer and historian who set up the Moby Dick Big Read project. Additional research by Jeroen Hoekendijk
• This article was amended on 7 August 2023 to include reference to a case of a human being injured by an orca in the wild; this relates to an incident in 1972, in which a surfer described being bitten by an orca off Point Sur, California, causing injuries to his leg that required 100 stitches.
