Toñi is around 60 years old and is known among researchers as the "grandmother" of the orca population that moves between the Strait of Gibraltar and the Gulf of Cádiz. This week she has appeared with as many as a dozen marks on her dorsal fin and back which, according to the organisations that monitor her, were not there in the photographs taken a few weeks earlier.
It was the conservation group WeWhale that raised the alarm after comparing the animal’s current condition with its previous photographic record. Janek Andre, founder of WeWhale and Iberian Orca Guardians, said that the wounds now visible on the fin and back are, in his view, consistent with the impact of a shotgun blast.
