Bored Orcas Target Boat Rudders in Iberian Waters, Scientists Say

Orcas attack boats to combat boredom. These are the conclusions of a report published last Friday by biologists, government officials and other representatives of the marine environment. According to their explanations, boat rudders are a toy of choice for orcas in open waters. In 2019, these cetaceans had faced food shortages due to the decline in the population of their main food source, the bluefin tuna. This situation forced them to spend the majority of their time hunting and eating all the food they could find. But after the rebound of the bluefin tuna population the following year, the whales no longer needed to spend all their time looking for food, leaving them with nothing to do. "The sea is a very boring place for an animal," Renaud de Stephanis, an orca specialist and president of Conservation, Information and Research on Cetaceans (CIRCE), who has been studying orcas since 1996, told USA Today. "Imagine that if you are a dog or another mammal, you can interact with the objects around you. But in the sea, there is not much that orcas can interact with, so they play with the rudders," he explained.

According to marine biologists, it all started with a game of a teenage humpback whale. This one played with the rudder in front of its peers, creating a trend. "Maybe this mammal touched a rudder and felt that it was something fun," Alex Zerbini, who chairs the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission, told the Washington Post. He continues: "And, after playing, it began to spread this behavior within the group until it became as widespread as it is today." In addition to this game, orcas also engage in other entertainments: they can play with other objects or animals in the sea, but can go overboard, killing in some cases the object of their amusement. "... In the population of resident orcas in the southern state of Washington, USA, which feed on salmon, the cetaceans will ’play’ with common porpoises to the point of killing them, which could be a similar escalation of an initially less harmful interaction," the researchers say.

Orca attacks around the Strait of Gibraltar separating Europe from Africa and off the Atlantic coast of Portugal and northwestern Spain are recurrent. There have been nearly 700 interactions since orca attacks on vessels in the region were first reported in May 2020, according to the Atlantic Orca Working Group (GTOA). According to experts, it is a group of about 15 individuals led by a female named White Gladis. To avoid further orca attacks, the authors of the report suggest making the rudders less fun for the orcas, or if possible, removing them completely. Marine biologists also advise recreational boaters to move around the orca hotspots to mitigate an attack before it occurs. "We don’t want to see more boats sink and we don’t want to see people in distress. But we also don’t want the animals to be hurt. And we have to remember that this is their habitat and we are in their way," Alex Zerbini will say.