Killer whale attacks on sailing boats off the coast of Spain have been on the rise for the past three years, raising questions among scientists and authorities, particularly about the mysterious role played by Gladis, the matriarch of a clan of this species known for its intelligence.
• Also read: Killer whales sink yachts in groups
“They attacked the rudder directly. They didn’t walk around the boat or try to play…nothing! They are racing towards the rudder at full speed,” Friedrich Sommer, German owner of the Muffet, a sailboat damaged by an orca attack, told AFP.
He’s not the only one waiting for his boat to be repaired in Barbate, a small town on Andalusia’s Atlantic coast (southern Spain).
“It completely lost its rudder” and the orca caused “structural damage to the hull,” says Rafael Pecci, in charge of repairs, of a sailboat owned by another foreigner.
Not far from the main beach you can see the mast of a boat that sank in early May after an attack by these whales, which can reach nine meters in length for males and seven meters for females and weigh from 3.5 to 6 tons .
These “interactions”, as experts and authorities call these attacks, began in 2020 off the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula, specifically between Cadiz and Tangier (Morocco).
This is explained by the increasing presence of one of the killer whales’ favorite prey in this area near the Strait of Gibraltar: the bluefin tuna, which arrives in spring from the Atlantic to spawn in the Mediterranean.
According to the Spanish sea rescue organization Salvamento Marítimo, there were already 28 “interactions” in 2023. Between 2020 and 2022, their number is close to 500, according to the Atlantic Killer Whale Task Force (GTOA).
Gladis and her granddaughter
“We know very little about what causes these interactions,” said AFP José Luis García Varas, director of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) ocean program in Spain.
There is no shortage of legends in the region, and an orca quickly became emblematic of the phenomenon: Gladis Lamari, matriarch of a clan credited with many attacks, is said to have taught her young to attack sailboats.
On its website, the GTOA shows the pedigree of a group of about fifteen related orcas called “Gladis” who attacked sailboats and whose matriarch she is.
Killer whales “form families, they form groups, they are very intelligent and there is a kind of verbal transmission of knowledge between them,” emphasizes José Luis García Varas.
María Dolores Iglesias, president of a local environmental organization, believes the matriarch is dead, but clan members continue to attack sailboats for instilling resentment in them.
“There is a granddaughter of Gladis” who uses “anger” to attack the boats, she says.
For his part, Renaud de Stephanis, doctor of marine sciences and president of the organization Circe (Conservation, Information and Study of Cetaceans), believes that there are “several hypotheses” that could explain these attacks.
One sees it as simple “games”, the other explains this behavior with “hostility”.
At the moment, “we do not have a definitive explanation,” adds the specialist, who is touring Spanish waters to use satellite tagging to detect and kill orca whales, as part of a program run by the Spanish Ministry of Ecological Transition that aims to “limit interactions.” pursue with boats” in the area.
” Scary »
“It was pretty scary,” British sailor April Boyes said on her Instagram account, after her sailboat was attacked by a group of orcas just as it entered the Strait of Gibraltar.
“They started kicking the rudder for more than an hour,” and after sending out two distress messages, “they were able to tear it off,” she adds.
This situation forced the crew to scoop the water out of the boat to avoid sinking before help arrived, as shown in a video accompanying his story.