PARTY WHALES

PARTY WHALES

NERD SHIT

It’s not an attack, it’s an interaction!

Mandy Brownholtz

It’s a story that seems manufactured for maximum Instagram shareability, not unlike the proliferation of “Mob wife aesthetic” to conveniently coincide with the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos. Beginning in 2020, scientists have been noting a significant uptick in killer whale attacks on pleasure boats between the Strait of Gibraltar, a narrow body of water that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, and Galicia, a coastal province in northwestern Spain. GTOA—or Groupo Trabajo Orca Atlantica—has recorded more than 400 of these incidents since 2020.

And, in fact, the behavior has an element of social contagion to it. It’s spreading! Hanne Strager, a Danish biologist and cofounder of Norway’s Andenes Whale Center, tells me: “They know exactly who is doing it. Of the 34 individuals in that population, more than 15 are doing it. In the beginning, it was just three.”

When she says this, I picture an FBI’s Most Wanted flyer on the walls of the Spanish coast guard, but it’s all orcas.

So why are they doing it? No one really knows for sure, according to Strager. But that doesn’t stop folks from assigning motives. “It’s revenge for destroying the planet!” your acquaintances might post, exhibiting (a) their commitment to socially acceptable liberal causes like fighting climate change, and (b) their dark, pithy sense of humor. “Humans are an invasive species!”

This story really piqued my interest when The New York Times reported that certain sailors were attempting to deter the orcas by blasting a playlist appropriately titled “Metal for Orcas,” featuring such mainstay death metal troupes as Dying Fetus and Aborted, into the ocean. But alas—it backfired! It seemed to make matters worse; the orcas ended up attacking the vessel’s rudder, and the crew had to be rescued by Spanish authorities.

According to the scientists, though, these orcas don’t appear to be hell-bent on revenge, nor are they attacking anyone. THEY JUST SEEM TO WANT TO HEADBANG.

“I don’t call them attacks,” says Dr. Deborah Giles, research director for the nonprofit organization Wild Orca. “I call them interactions.” This is an important delineation to make! I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if someone imposed a nefarious rationale on you with no evidence, so let’s extend the whales a similar courtesy.

Strager and Dr. Giles, or simply Giles as she prefers to be known, are two of the world’s leading experts on killer whales. Giles focuses primarily on the conservation of the killer whales that live in the waters off the Pacific Northwest, whereas Strager mostly studies the whale populations in the waters off Northern Norway.

There are some slight “cultural” differences between populations of killer whales depending on their geographic location, which mostly has to do with what they eat and how to best hunt that prey—orcas that eat salmon behave somewhat differently from those that eat tuna, for example. But for the purposes of Nerd Shit, we’re gonna lump ’em in together.

Giles continues: “If it was a proper attack, like a real attack, there would be a lot more damage and a lot more of the vessels would have sunk. ’’

While she thinks that killer whales certainly have cause for retribution (surely you’ve seen that documentary by now), she doesn’t believe that it’s the motive for these attacks.

“They’re complex in ways that our brains aren’t even complex,” she explains. “They’ve got parts of their brains that are more developed than ours, namely the paralimbic system that’s specifically associated with memory and emotion. And so if we just look at that aspect of it, it’s possible that they have the capacity for revenge, but we’ve never seen that behavior in killer whales in the wild."

It seems we’ve projected our own guilt about our destmction of the planet onto these creatures. They aren’t trying to make some elaborate political statement like tossing a can of soup at the Mona Lisa. Really, Giles suspects, they’re just trying to vibe: “My take is that they’re being positively reinforced for this behavior,” she says. “As we’ve mentioned, these are incredibly intelligent animals. They’re also very tactile animals. For example, their skin is very sensitive. You run a finger across their skin and they can feel it. They like to interact with things in their environment. ’’

She notes that captive orcas have a tendency to engage in stereotypies, or repetitive behaviors—they might bang their head on a gate over and over, or gnaw on their cage. Wild orcas also engage with their surroundings, but in a more lighthearted way: “They’ll go over and play around in kelp beds. They’ll even play with birds that are on the surface of the water,” notes Giles. “They play with each other and are known to interact with buoys and things like that.”

Because these so-called interactions have occurred while the boats are moving, she suspects it has something to do with the vibrations or motion: “It could be the water moving around the keel or the rudder that’s interesting to them.... Sometimes they get in the wake of large container ships and body-surf. And this is something that is providing some sort of positive feedback to them.”

So there you have it—it simply feels good! They’re only foolin’ around is all! While I can sympathize with any of God’s creatures just trying to have a good time, Id also like to be prepared should a 13,000-pound sea creature start grooving on the hull of my superyacht. Which brings us back to “Metal for Orcas.”

Giles notes she felt perplexed when she heard that sailors were attempting to use music to deter these creatures. Why? Because Giles says what really bothers these behemoths is random, loud, irregular noises. Not death metal.

Better to use oikomi pipes—eight-foot-long hollow metal tubes—that were developed by Japanese sailors fishing for dolphins. They’d beat on the pipes with hammers or pound them against the side of the boat to startle the dolphins, herding them into coves where they could be captured more easily. They’ve since been used by Giles and other scientists like her for more noble purposes—that is, to drive killer whales away from dangers like oil spills.

She suggests these work much better than music—the oikomi pipes are tinny, loud, and obnoxious, whereas rock music has a melodic, formulaic quality to it. “It’s possible the whales will just get used to [rock music],” Giles explains. “They don’t like random sound. They don’t like loud noises. And so rock music, as you know, it’s predictable. It’s possible they just got used to it and it wasn’t startling, because the idea with sound is that you want to startle them out of whatever they’re doing and drive them away because it’s too unsettling."

For those who don’t like death metal, this might come as a surprise, that the music was too pleasant to drive the orcas away. And if you do like death metal, you might feel strangely validated, all those times your mother yelled up the stairs to “turn down that godforsaken noise!” As for me, I say the sailors just aren’t thinking far enough outside the box. Why stop at Dying Fetus? Blast some Skinny Puppy into the sea, perhaps some Godflesh?

That said, it would be hard to find out. While Giles thinks “further experimentation with different types of music would be awesome,” Strager says it would be nearly impossible to conduct a controlled experiment on the matter, and that to suggest they may be deterred by any one type of sound versus another would be speculation. She continues: “We don’t know anything about the musical abilities or perceptions of killer whales, so I wouldn’t have an idea [what genre of music] they would like better than another. For me, I would be a stupid human and pick what I don’t like, and think, Well, if I don’t like it, I’m a mammal, maybe they don’t like it.’”

Just like a human being to ASSUME! We know that for humans, music seems to be really important to our brains, but we don’t know that for whales. However, if you’re not blasting it so loud as to hurt their hearing, as far as I can tell, it would be harmless to try. So grab that aux cord, my seafaring CREEM readers, and sail off into the sunset.