The unusual behavior could also be playful or what researchers call a "fad" - a behavior initiated by one or two individuals and temporarily picked up by others before it’s abandoned. Since the abnormal interactions began in 2020, four orcas belonging to a subpopulation living in Iberian waters have died, although their deaths cannot be directly linked to encounters with boats. Orcas appear to perceive the behavior as advantageous, despite the risk they run by slamming into moving boat structures, López Fernandez added. Orcas and humpbacks clash in a violent melee of breaching and biting Orca males are burnouts who let their moms do all the hunting, surprising study finds 2 orcas slaughter 19 sharks in a single day in South Africa, eating their livers and leaving them to rot "We do not interpret that the orcas are teaching the young, although the behavior has spread to the young vertically, simply by imitation, and later horizontally among them, because they consider it something important in their lives," López Fernandez said.
In the majority of reported cases, orcas have made a beeline for a boat's rudder and either bitten, bent or broken it. Orcas are social creatures that can easily learn and reproduce behaviors performed by others, according to the 2022 study. "That traumatized orca is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat," López Fernandez said.
"The orcas are doing this on purpose, of course, we don't know the origin or the motivation, but defensive behavior based on trauma, as the origin of all this, gains more strength for us every day," López Fernandez said.Įxperts suspect that a female orca they call White Gladis suffered a "critical moment of agony" - a collision with a boat or entrapment during illegal fishing - that flipped a behavioral switch. Researchers think that a traumatic event may have triggered a change in the behavior of one orca, which the rest of the population has learned to imitate.
The spike in aggression towards boats is a recent phenomenon, López Fernandez said. We estimate that killer whales only touch one ship out of every hundred that sail through a location." "In more than 500 interaction events recorded since 2020 there are three sunken ships. Most encounters have been harmless, López Fernandez told Live Science in an email.
0 kommentar(er)
