“Killer” whales or the hypocrisy of not admitting the truth

There isa problem, and a big one, between killer whales and sailboats. In the first-person account of someone who had his boat sunk by a “commando” of orcas, you understand this very well. At the gates of the Mediterranean, killer whales are attacking boats more and more frequently.
Sometimes it goes well and the boat stays afloat.
Sometimes, it doesn’t.

Killer whales, but why?

In our account of the Tarifa (Spain) incident, we called killer whales “killer whales,” transliterating from the English term for them, killer whales, in fact.
We havebeen showered with insults by the keyboard lions of the web, but gentlemen, we did not make anything up.Pliny the Elder as early as the first century A.D. called them ruthless predators (not coincidentally, the scientific name, Orcinus Orca, derives from Orcus, the god of the Underworld in Roman mythology).
Ancient Spanish whalers had noticed that they were capable of hunting whale species far larger than themselves.
Therefore, they called them “whale killers.”
In the 16th century, two great naturalists, Ulisse Aldrovandi (founder of the Bologna Botanical Garden and author of a thirteen-volume work on animals) and the Swiss Konrad von Gessner described giant-sized cetaceans that devoured ships.
Back to the present day.
The Tarifa attack is the latest in a long series: the emergency is real, in the past year,orcas have sunk two boats and caused damage to at least a dozen boats; there were as many as 28 interactions with killer whales in Spain alone in 2023.
A sensational case of as many as three boats being attacked while transferring to the Copa del Rey regatta in Palma de Mallorca, Mediterranean .
Riavvolgendo il nastro del tempo, la musica non cambia. Everyone remembers Ambrogio Fogar’s Surprise, which on January 19, 1978 while sailing from Buenos Aires to Cape Horn with journalist Mauro Mancini also on board was attacked by a pod of killer whales and sank within minutes. Fogar and Mancini managed to board the life raft where they drifted for 74 days without water or food before being rescued by a Greek freighter. Mancini, however, died soon after the rescue. Only two years earlier, in 1976, another assault by a pod of killer whales sank Giorgio Falck’s famous Guia III off Southampton, England. The boat was attacked by a group of five orcas that threw themselves violently against the hull, opening a huge breach in the hull and causing it to sink within minutes.
The pseudo-animalist controversy over what to call these superpredators at the apex of the food pyramid is a false issue, dictated by misinformation and, probably, the desire for controversy itself. The real issue is to understand why killer whales attack sailboats. The scientific community still has not provided us with answers, systems such as “pingers” (frequency emitters that are supposed to disturb orcas) are not effective, turning off the engine when orcas approach does not work.

Are killer whales bad? Probably not. Do they attack the boats? Yes. Is calling them murderers fair?
It doesn’t matter.

Eugenio Ruocco – Deputy Editor of The Journal of Sailing

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