A pod of orcas seen in the Strait of Gibraltar in 2021.
Renaud de Stephanis/CIRCE Conservation Information and Research
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Renaud de Stephanis/CIRCE Conservation Information and Research
A pod of orcas seen in the Strait of Gibraltar in 2021.
Renaud de Stephanis/CIRCE Conservation Information and Research
Ester Kristine Storkson was sleeping on her father’s small yacht earlier this month, sailing off the coast of France, when she was violently awakened.
Crashing on deck, she noticed several orcas, or killer whales, surrounding them. The steering wheel shook wildly. At one point, the 37-foot sailboat flipped 180 degrees, heading in the opposite direction.
They were “rocking the boat,” says Storkson. “They [hit] us repeatedly … giving us the impression that it was a coordinated attack.”
“I said to my dad, ‘I’m not thinking clearly, so you have to think about me,'” says the 27-year-old Norwegian medical student. “Thankfully, he’s a very calm and collected person and he made me feel safe by gently talking about the situation.”
After about 15 minutes, the orcas broke away, leaving father and daughter to assess the damage. They strapped on a GoPro camera in the water, she says, and could see that “about three-quarters of [the rudder] it came off and some of the metal was bent.”
A screen grab from a video of the encounter between a group of orcas and the Storkson boat.
Ester Kristine Storkson/
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Ester Kristine Storkson/
A screen grab from a video of the encounter between a group of orcas and the Storkson boat.
Ester Kristine Storkson/
For any vessel, losing direction at sea is a serious matter and can be dangerous in adverse conditions, and several sailboats have had to be towed to port after orcas destroyed their rudders. Fortunately, the Storksons were left with enough rudder to limp into Brest, on the French coast, for repairs. But the incident temporarily derailed their plan to reach Madeira, off northwest Africa, part of an ambitious plan to sail around the world.
there there is no record of an orca killing a human in the wild. However, two boats were reportedly sunk by orcas off the coast of Portugal last month, in the worst such encounter since authorities have tracked them.
The incident involving the Storksons is one peripheral, says Renaud de Stephanis, president and coordinator at CIRCE Conservación Information and Research, a cetacean research group based in Spain. It was further north — nowhere near the Straits of Gibraltar, nor the coast of Portugal or Spain, where other such reports originate.
This is a puzzle. Until now, scientists have assumed that only a few animals are involved in these encounters and that they are all from the same tail, says de Stephanis.
“I really don’t understand what happened there,” he admits. “It’s too far, I mean, I don’t think so [the orcas] would go up there for a few days and then come back.”
These encounters – most scientists avoid the word “attack” – have attracted the attention of sailors and scientists in the past two years, as their frequency appears to be increasing. Sailing magazines and websites have written about the phenomenon, noting that orcas seem to be particularly attracted to a boat’s rudder. A Facebook group, with more than 13,000 members, has been set up to trade personal reports of orca encounters and speculation on evasion tactics. And, of course, there is no shortage of dramatic videos posted on YouTube.
Scientists don’t know why, but they have some ideas
Scientists hypothesize that orcas like the water pressure produced by a boat’s propeller. “What we think is that they are looking to have the propeller in their face,” says de Stephanis. So when they come across a sailboat that doesn’t work with its engine, “they kind of get frustrated and that’s why they break the rudder.”
However, that doesn’t quite explain an experience Martin Evans had last June when he was helping to ship a sailboat from Ramsgate, England, to Greece.
About 25 miles off the coast of Spain, “just shy of entering the Straits of Gibraltar,” Evans and his crewmates were cruising, but they were also working the boat’s engine with the propeller used to increase their speed. .
While Evans was on the lookout, the steering wheel began to move so violently that he couldn’t hold on, he says.
Martin Evans
to YouTube
“I was like, ‘Jesus, what is that?'” he recalled. “It was like a bus was moving it… I look over the side and suddenly I saw that familiar black and white of the killer whale.”
Evans noticed “pieces of steering wheel on the surface.”
The population of orcas along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts is quite small. Scientists believe the damage to the boats is being done by just a few juvenile males, says Jared Towers, director of Bay Cetology, a research organization in British Columbia.
“There’s something about moving parts … that seems to stimulate them,” he says. “Maybe that’s why they’re focused on the wheel.”
If a small number of orcas are involved, they may simply outgrow the behavior, says de Stephanis. As the young males grow, they will need to help the porcupines hunt for food and will have less time to play with sailboats.
“This is a game,” he speculates. “When they … have their adult lives, it will probably stop.”
An orca calf, photographed in the Strait of Gibraltar, in 2021.
Renaud de Stephanis/CIRCE Conservation Information and Research
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Renaud de Stephanis/CIRCE Conservation Information and Research
An orca calf, photographed in the Strait of Gibraltar, in 2021.
Renaud de Stephanis/CIRCE Conservation Information and Research
Towers points out that such “games” tend to go in and out of fashion in orca society. For example, now in a population he studies in the Pacific, “we have juvenile males that … often interact with shrimp and crab traps,” he says. “It’s just been a fad for a few years.”
In the 1990s, for some orcas in the Pacific, something else was in vogue. “They would kill fish and just swim with this fish on their head,” Towers says. “We just don’t see that anymore.”