The Sons of Tilikum

                                                                

                             The Sons of Tilikum

As if this year was not bad enough, the BBC interviews a guy whose catamaran was attacked by orcas--killer whales--off the coast of Portugal.

The encounter is one of at least 40 similar incidents in the area. During the summer of 2020 a group of killer whales off the coast of Spain and Portugal began to act very strangely indeed.

Accounts of the incidents suggested that the animals were deliberately targeting sailing boats. As the captain puts it: “They came to us, not the other way around.”

The first reported incident was back in July, the most recent at the end of October.

Behind international headlines about “rogue killer whales”, “orchestrated” orca attacks and the videos shared thousands of times on social media, there is a forensic marine science investigation that is still trying to work out what is driving these complex, intelligent and highly social marine mammals to behave in this way.

Photo and video line-up showed that three individuals were involved in most of the incidents: juvenile males named in the official orca record as black Gladis, white Gladis and grey Gladis.

Killer whales live, hunt and move in very closely connected family pods: tightly knit, matriarch-led groups that - in some populations - have even been shown to have their own pod-specific dialects.

Families generally stick closely together, with long-lived grandmothers helping to raise young and to teach youngsters to hunt. Males though will wander off, mixing and mating among other pods. So far, the researchers have not worked out which family “the three Gladises” belong to.

All sorts of explanations have been offered from play to revenge. As usual, we have the good sense to analyze organized animals as if they were neolithic people. But the interesting lesson here is that these guys can weigh 4-5 tons, they compete with us for blue-fin tuna, and they teach and learn. So how come the virus is scarier?