Orcas, not us, are probably the most successful mammal on Earth. Instead, I was part of this interaction of three cultures: orca, sperm whale and human. I felt I’d given up all notion of being a “superior” animal. As one of the Blue Planet film unit later told me, it is the same technique used by orcas to flip seals off ice floes. At the last moment they slipped beneath us. I was the only one looking over the other side when five of the whales charged at us. They began to circle us in the same way they had done with the whales, then head-butted our boat three times. The orcas were defeated by the massed sperm whales. When one of the orcas headed directly at us, we quickly got back in the boat. Close by, we came upon 30 of them surrounded by two pods of orcas trying to predate the sperm whale calves. Andrew Sutton and I were eight nautical miles off the coast of Sri Lanka, diving with a megapod of sperm whales. I’ve spent 20 years seeing and writing about whales, but I didn’t see an orca again until 2017. As I and my whale-besotted sisters watched Ramu jump through his hoop, we realised that a magnificent animal had been reduced to a circus trick. He was kept in the dolphinarium at Windsor Safari Park (now Legoland) in the 1970s. The first whale I ever saw was an orca named (by humans) Ramu. According to the charity Whale and Dolphin Conservation, at least 174 orcas have died in captivity since 1961, having been forced to swim aimlessly about in overgrown swimming pools without any of the peer interaction that defines them. Part of me is secretly excited at this idea of nature fighting back. He said that, while we can only speculate about the causes: “The spread of reaction to past trauma by one individual is plausible … but so are other explanations such as curiosity and play.” Luke Rendell of the University of St Andrews has studied orcas extensively in the wild. In the interventions, “grandmother” orcas have been seen to be observers, as if directing the events. Females pass on knowledge of feeding grounds and techniques. Orca society is matriarchal it recognises post-menopausal females as the most important members of a pod. The bare bones of Dr López Fernandez’s report evoke a plaintive story. “All this has to make us reflect on the fact that human activities are at the origin of this behaviour.” Other Gladis whales have been entangled with fishing gear or suffered lacerations and even amputations. They suspect an individual, Gladis Blanca, initiated this behaviour after a “critical moment of agony”, perhaps as a result of collison with a vessel she also has a young daughter, born in 2021. Dr López Fernandez and his team have named, generically, the interacting orcas Gladis (after their original scientific name, Orca gladiator). This behaviour coincides with the profile of adults.”Įither way, it is an astonishing notion. This behaviour matches the profile of juveniles.” Or that it is a “response to an adverse situation one or several individuals have had a bad experience and are trying to stop the boat so as not to repeat it. One, the orcas “have invented something new and repeat it. ‘Orcas, not us, are probably the most successful mammal on Earth.’ Photograph: Andrew Suttonĭr Alfredo López Fernandez, of GTOA, told me that they have two hypotheses.
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