Whale revenge narratives are nothing new-just look at the plot of Orca. Maybe the orcas can ram our metaphorical hull. To be pushed out of apathy, maybe we need punishment. Inaction and denial imperils countless species, including our own. These orca attacks come at a moment when knowledge of-and concern about-climate change is at an all-time high.

“We are compelled by them.” And though our story about orcas may not be true, our environmental wrongs certainly are. “Revenge narratives are very attractive,” said Tim Jensen, author of Ecologies of Guilt in Environmental Rhetorics and a professor at Oregon State University. But in the spirit of magical thinking, we persist. Those in the know have cautioned against and outright decried ascribing resentful motivations to whales. Some researchers speculate that an older female orca, White Gladis, may have begun targeting boat rudders as a trauma response after being struck by a ship or trapped during illegal fishing but many have also proposed that messing with boats is a new game among social animals (like in 1987 when, inexplicably, several pods from the Pacific Northwest started wearing dead salmon hats ). Sure, most scientists, including those studying this population, agree that the orcas don’t have a vendetta-despite how badly we want to believe it. We’re joining the orca war, on the whales’ side. Don’t ask them about the missing submersible. And people are delighted: The whales are anticapitalist. If memes and news coverage are any indication, the orcas, sick of humanity’s breach of their home, are revolting.

In an unusual and spreading behavior that started in 2020, orcas living around the Iberian Peninsula have been ramming sailboats in hundreds of documented interactions, sinking three vessels in the process.

”įantasies of orca revenge have captivated us in recent months, dominating the news cycle and social media (at least until some billionaires died by implosion on a Titanic viewing trip in the deep sea).

“And like human beings,” the narrator booms, “they have a profound instinct for vengeance. A disembodied voiceover accompanied by footage of fins knifing through water offers mostly true facts about the incredible whales: Orcas have highly developed brains, transmit cultural dialects, and retain close-knit family structures in insular pods. The trailer for the 1977 horror thriller Orca establishes its stakes with pure dramatic flourish.

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