A wildlife filmmaker who documents whales says orcas likely aren't attacking boats to eat people, since they can feast on swimmers if they want
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- A pod of orcas has been targeting yachts off the Iberian peninsula for the last three years.
- A wildlife filmmaker who documents whales says they're probably not trying to attack humans.
- Scientists still only have theories as to why the orcas are continually attacking human vessels.
A wildlife filmmaker known for documenting human-whale interactions thinks it's unlikely that orcas are attacking yachts to eat the humans on board.
The internet can't stop talking about the escapades of a pod of orcas that, for the last three years, have been behaving aggressively toward vessels off the Iberian peninsula. The orcas have been recorded ramming into hulls, smashing rudders, and even sinking some boats. Over 200 interactions were logged in 2022.
Observers have all manner of theories trying to explain the spike in orca confrontations. Some scientists say the animals might have been curious or wanted to play, while others think they may acted defensively based on past trauma.
But you can probably rule out the theory that the apex predators were looking for a meal, film director and author Tom Mustill told The Guardian's Emma Beddington.
"If killer whales wanted to start attacking people, disabling small vessels is a very strange way of going about that," said Mustill, who created a BBC documentary on human encounters with whales and wrote the book "How to Speak Whale."
"They could just start eating swimmers all over the place," Mustill added, per The Guardian.
While orcas generally prefer deeper waters, they can sometimes inhabit regions frequented by humans, such as the coast of Norway.
But orca attacks are rare — there are no modern records of humans being killed by an orca in the wild, though captive orcas have killed at least four people. Three of those attacks involved the same animal.
And although orcas have been known to kill for sport, they typically avoid attacking humans, befuddling marine biologists.
"I think they just think humans are some odd thing, certainly not food, and not really anything that they are bothered by," Danish biologist and whale researcher Hanne Strager previously told Insider's Kelsey Vlamis and Hannah Getahun.