White Gladis: Warning issued after killer whales attack and sink another boat in Strait of Gibraltar

Killer whales have rammed and sunk another boat off the coast of Morocco, prompting a warning from authorities for sailors to beware.

It’s the latest of seven sinkings since May 2020 when the unusual, disruptive behavior was first reported.

It is not known how many orcas were involved in the most recent attack, however, some reports point to it being the work of a notorious pod led by a killer whale dubbed White Gladis by locals.

It is believed White Gladis could be teaching other whales how to attack and sink boats after she experienced a bad interaction several years ago, either after being struck by a boat or getting caught in a net.

Experts believe she may have been pregnant when she first started the attacks.

Frightening interactions between the apex predators and vessels have skyrocketed over the past four years between the Strait of Gibraltar and the Gulf of Cadiz but scientists aren’t quite sure why.

In the latest incident on Sunday, two people aboard 15-metre yacht the Alborán Cognac in Moroccan waters requested help from Spain’s maritime rescue service after reporting that an orca knocked the craft several times.

The passengers reported feeling sudden blows to the hull and rudder before the boat began to leak.

After raising the alarm, the people were safely picked up by a passing oil tanker but the vessel drifted and sank.

Spain’s ministries for transport and the environment, along with its merchant marines, issued notices Tuesday urging both sailing boats and small motorboats to beware of orcas between May and August and to stick to the coastline in the area between the Strait of Gibraltar and the Gulf of Cadiz.

The Atlantic Orca Working Group, a team of Spanish and Portuguese marine life researchers who study killer whales near the Iberia Peninsula, says there were 197 such known interactions in 2021 and another 207 in 2022.

Last year, a pod of orcas disrupted sailing event, The Ocean Race, when a boat sailing from the Netherlands to Italy had a 15-minute encounter with the animals, prompting the crew to drop their craft’s sails and raise a clatter to fend them off.

At the time, Team JAJO skipper Jelmer van Beek said three orcas came straight at the yacht and started hitting the rudders.

“Impressive to see the orcas, beautiful animals, but also a dangerous moment for us as a team ... Luckily, after a few attacks, they went away,” he said.

There have been no reports of attacks against swimmers. The interactions on boats seem to stop once the vessel becomes immobilised and most have been on sailboats or catamarans.

Researchers say that the killer whales seem to be targeting boats in a wide arc covering the western coast of the Iberia Peninsula, from the waters near the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain’s northwestern Galicia.

The orcas off the Iberian coast average from 5 to 6½ metres in length, compared to orcas in Antarctica that reach nine metres.

There are two theories about why this sub-population of orcas is launching the attacks.

The first is that it is a new “social fad” being spearheaded by the juvenile whales as a playful expression of their curiosity, the other that it is a response to a bad past experience involving a boat.

The orcas usually attack the boats’ rudder, sometimes scraping the hull with their teeth. Such attacks often snap the rudder, leaving the boat unable to navigate.

In a number of cases, the animals damaged a boat so badly that it sank. In July 2022 they sank a sailboat with five people onboard and in November 2022 a sailboat carrying four people went down. All were rescued safely.

— with AP