Increase in orca attacks on yachts in the Strait of Gibraltar – rts.ch

A boat damaged by an attack of killer whales, in Barbate, on the Andalusian Atlantic coast (southern Spain). [JORGE GUERRERO – afp]“They hit the radar directly. They didn’t circle the boat or try to play… nothing! They rushed at the radar at full speed,” Friedrich Sommer, the German owner of the “Muffet,” told AFP. “, a sailboat damaged by an orc attack.

In Barbate, a small town on the Andalusian Atlantic coast (southern Spain), he was not the only one waiting for his boat to be repaired. “It completely lost its rudder” and the killer whales did “structural damage to the hull,” explains Raffaele Beggi, in charge of repairs, about another foreign-owned sailboat.

The mast of a boat that sank in early May after being attacked by these cetaceans, which weigh 3.5 to 6 tons and are nine meters long for males and seven meters for females, was found not far from the main beach. .

28 “Communications”

These “interactions”, used by experts and authorities to describe these attacks, began in 2020 along the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula, specifically between Cádiz and Tangier (Morocco). This is explained by the increased presence in this area near the Strait of Gibraltar of one of the killer whales’ favorite prey: the bluefin tuna, which spawns in the Mediterranean from the Atlantic in spring.

According to Spanish marine rescue organization Salvamento Marítimo, 28 “interactions” have already taken place in 2023. Between 2020 and 2022, according to the Atlantic Killer Whale Task Force (GTOA), their numbers have reached nearly 500.

>> 18.09.2021 at 7:30 PM Review images of these attacks:

Many hypotheses

“We know very little about the causes of these interactions,” says José Luis García Varas, head of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) Oceans Program in Spain. There is no shortage of legends in the region and one orca quickly became the symbol of the event: Gladys Lamari, the mother of a clan, responsible for many attacks, He would have taught his children to attack sailboats.

Killer whales “form families, groups, they are very intelligent and there is a kind of exchange of knowledge between them”, insists Jose Luis García Varas.

For his part, Renaud de Stephanis, Doctor of Marine Science and head of the organization Circe (Cetaceans Protection, Information and Research), believes there are “several hypotheses” that could explain these attacks. While some explain this behavior by a certain “hostility” that killer whales feel towards sailboats and other boats, others see it as simple “games”. Currently, “we don’t have a definitive explanation,” he underlines.

>> Pictures of an orca attack near Gibraltar:

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