A scientist researching orca attacks on yachts off the Iberian coast says they are doing it for the “adrenaline shot”.
As The Evening Standard reports, marine biologist Renaud de Stephanis said he believed the whales were ramming boats for fun, and not out of malice.
At least three boats have sunk in some 500 incidents recorded since 2020.
“Don’t ask me how they started it because I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone ever will. What we do think is that it is a simple game for them,” de Stephanis is quoted as saying.
He is completing a report on the orca behaviour for the Spanish Ministry of Ecological Transition.
He referred to one particular orca that has a deep scar on its back, believed to have been caused by hitting an engine propeller.
“She belongs to a family of seven members and as far as we know, she is the most active of all,” he said.
Underwater cameras have helped researchers capture numerous videos of the incidents since they began in 2020.
A separate report published by LiveScience in May of this year quoted scientists who believe a traumatic event may have triggered a change in behaviour of one orca which the rest of the Iberian orca population had learned to imitate.
Marine biologist Alfredo López Fernandez of the University of Aveiro in Portugal and representative of the Grupo de Trabajo Orca Atlántica, or Atlantic Orca Working Group, said that “ defensive behaviour based on trauma, as the origin of all this, gains more strength for us every day”.
The Iberian orca population is listed as critically endangered, with just 39 of the animals recorded in the last census in 2011.
