What the hell is going on with the orcas?
On orcas, the questions they raise, and what's left unanswered
Once again, orcas are having a moment. It’s been a minute since our last media frenzy on killer whales, but there have been a few. The last big one was probably Blackfish. Prior to that? Free Willy. And before that was Shamu. As long as we have shared the oceans with orcas, we have been fascinated by and fearful of them.
This time around, the orcas seem to be leaning hard into the “killer” part of killer whale, attacking as many as 500 boats in one corner of the Atlantic. This is unprecedented orca behavior, without any scientific explanation (but a few guesses). With humble beginnings in snarky twitter coverage, the story has blown up and re-ignited interest in orcas all around the world. And it’s showing us just how much we still don’t know about them.
A few weeks ago a particularly harrowing incident of the latest in a series of orca attacks hit twitter. The now-famous pod of juvenile delinquent orcas, led by an older female, White Gladis, has been observed attacking boats off the strait of Gibraltar since 2020. Here you can see a video of their means of attack: ripping at the rudders and sterns of boats, stranding them and occasionally sinking them.
The twitter discourse, which ranges from humorous to dangerously misinformed, has sparked an onslaught of coverage. The takes range from anti-orca, to platitudinous, to silly. What might normally be considered a local story about orcas turning up off the coast of Cape Cod is getting national coverage.
It is thought that White Gladis—not to be confused with Gladys White, whose obituary turned up during my research—is leading these attacks in response to a “critical moment of agony” she suffered from a boat strike. Or so goes the theory, originally speculated by Alfredo López Fernandez, PhD of the University of Aveiro in Portugal.
But the truth is, we don’t know. There’s a lot we don’t know about orcas. There’s big picture stuff we don’t know. Are all of the orcas one species? How many orcas are there in the world? Why don’t they hunt people?
And then there are the real mysteries. We don’t know why in 1987, for instance, it became popular among orcas in the Puget Sound to drape a dead salmon on their heads. Or why orcas are hunting sharks—but only eating their livers—off the coast of South Africa. More mysterious, is how they learned these new behaviors and the mechanics of how orcas teach each other.
Since the release of Blackfish in 2013, public opinion about keeping orcas (and to some extent, other dolphins) in captivity has shifted dramatically. As SeaWorld phases out its killer whale shows and has ceased breeding captive orcas, it seems that we are reaching the end of the captive orca era.
However, with the gaps in their natural history, there is some merit to keeping orcas in captivity for research purposes. Although this has its limitations. Captive orcas are key to our understanding of orca sonar, how they use their faculties, even what healthy orca poop should look like. But the conditions of captive experiments, even those in sea pens, are not so useful in understanding orca social behavior. Additionally, given that the world’s orca subspecies are genetically and behaviorally distinct from one another, the findings from captive orcas can only really be applied to the subspecies of orca to which they belong.
Still, it would appear that simply being in captivity has effects on orcas that are not totally understood, though the husbandry and welfare continue to improve.
Outside of captivity, orca attacks on people are exceedingly rare. In the wild, there have been no “well-documented” accounts of orcas killing a person.1 That being said… the orca track record gets murky prior to 1910.
Orcas and people have a long shared history. The Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, including the Haida, the Kwakwakaʼwakw, and the Tlingit, each have a unique mythology surrounding orcas, though all of which are founded in reverence.
Westerners have their own longstanding relationship with orcas. Good old Pliny the Elder wrote an account of orcas hunting other whales as early as 70 AD. He also wrote an account, once considered to be fictitious, of an orca coming into the Port of Ostia to feed on imported animal hides that had fallen overboard. In the ensuing days, the orca had “glutted” itself on so many hides, that the Emperor Claudius demanded it be killed. With legions of men, they netted the orca and eventually did kill it, though it swamped several boats in the process.
The earliest account of a whale attacking seafarers was Porphyrios, a legendary whale known for attacking ships off the coast of sixth century Constantinople. For some time, it was thought that Porphyrios might have been a sperm whale, due to its supposedly dark color. But an orca may have been more likely, due to Porphyrios’ tendency to attack in coastal waters.
Prior to Shamu, Westerners were in closest contact with orcas during the peak of the whaling industry in the mid 1800s. Despite being known as killer whales, orcas are actually members of the dolphin family (“killer dolphin” lacks panache). Without the baleen and blubber reserves that were prized in the true whales, orcas were of limited commercial value to whalers. But they did have their uses.
Some whalers saw orcas as a nuisance, using guns to shoot at them as they scavenged whale carcasses and competed for prey. Others saw orcas as a helper, a hunting dog for whalers. They would alert the whalers to the presence of whales, and sometimes would even aid in the kill.
In Eden, Australia, an orca named Old Tom helped one family hunt whales for three generations. This behavior is thought to have been born from generations of aboriginal Australians working alongside of orcas to hunt whales in a contract known as the "Law of the Tongue.” The Law of the Tongue is a tit-for-tat agreement between the Katunga, famed indigenous whalers, and the orcas. The Law dictates that the orcas will help to bring down whale prey in exchange for their favorite morsel of the carcass: the tongue.
The state of orcas today is mixed. On the one hand, we have aberrant behaviors popping up in wild orca populations, underscoring how little we know about them. On the other, we’ve swung around on keeping orcas in captivity; it’s no longer acceptable to the public. Just in writing this, there’s been a lot of dissent to hack through to find the legitimate research that’s come from captive cetaceans. But as much as we care about orcas—and I think we care a lot—the oceans continue to become more polluted, more acidic, and noisier.
At the Miami Seaquarium, a plan has been hatched to “release” Lolita (aka Tokitae) to a sea pen in her home waters in the PNW. At 57 years young, Tokitae has earned the distinction of being the oldest orca in captivity. And while her enclosure at the Miami Seaquarium is below modern standards for marine mammal tanks, it’s been Tokitae’s home for 53 years.
There are serious concerns surrounding the current plans to release Tokitae. Toki’s caretakers, including her keepers, vets, and trainers, all feel strongly that Tokitae is an exceptionally poor candidate for release, despite the excellent Hollywood movie it would make. She is, basically the killer whale version of a crotchety old lady. She reacts very poorly to change, including changes to her diet and medical regime, she treasures her routine, and she likes her trainers, as discussed by Heather Keenan and Marni Wood on the ZooLogic podcast. Additionally, there are medical concerns. Tokitae suffers from respiratory health issues and is possibly deaf in one ear. It would be like leaving your sick, elderly, pampered dog on the side of the highway.
Despite this, the idea of a free Toki has captured the public’s imagination. She has thousands of supporters across the country, as well as the support of the Lummi Nation, whose waters Tokitae was born in. It would seem that Tokitae is headed down the same path as Keiko, the orca best known for playing Willy in Free Willy. Keiko, who was born in the wild but raised in captivity, was released to his home waters off the coast of Iceland. Re-acclimating Keiko to the wild began in 1998 and he was fully released in 2002. But sadly, Keiko died in 2003 from pneumonia and while he occasionally encountered other orcas during his time in the wild, he died alone. Keiko’s release is the only other instance of returning an orca to the wild.
Lolita “will become a symbol,” says Eduardo Albor, the CEO of the Dolphin Company, which recently acquired the Miami Seaquarium. But Tokitae is already is a symbol. She is a symbol of a bygone era, whose legacy, at least now anyways, is entrenched in concrete holding tanks and Blackfish. But Tokitae is also a symbol of change, representing our ever-evolving understanding of what orcas are and what they mean to us.
Right now, it seems like the orca is particularly meaningful to us. Highly charismatic and poorly understood, the orca is the sulky bad boy of the sea—the Zayn of marine mammals. Without having a truly good understanding of these animals and their habits, they have become a canvas for whatever we want for ourselves. The orcas yearn for freedom, they want a clean ocean. They want solidarity against the ruling class!
Since before Pliny was the younger, we have been enthralled by, scared of, and revered orcas. Our fascination with orcas continues, though set against a very different backdrop. Since the international ban on whaling, orcas no longer enjoy the spoils of the whale industry. They are struck by large ships and have their senses damaged by noise pollution. Their habitats are altered, and with it their prey. For better and for worse, we have learned to keep orcas in captivity.
In each time and culture, including our own, stretching back, past Tilikum, past Shamu, past Porphyrios, orcas have consistently told us little about themselves, but have revealed a great deal about us. They’ve forced us to answer: who is the most powerful creature in the ocean? What is acceptable to kill with a harpoon? What is acceptable to keep in captivity? And now—just when we thought we knew it all, the orcas have come ramming into our boats begging to know, “what are you gonna do about it?”
There are anecdotal accounts of orcas killing and eating an Inuit man who became trapped in a polynya (essentially a “pond” of seawater on the surface of contiguous ice) that had also trapped a pod of orcas. The original account occurred c. 1955, but a 2014 paper in the journal Aquatic Mammals include accounts from two Igloolik elders that would confirm that a young man had indeed been killed by the orca pod trapped in the polynya. The full account can be found here.