“When we step outside our rush to project, it’s actually very reflective of where we’re at with cetacean sciences: we’re starting to understand that they’re so complicated and nuanced, and that individuals are very different from one another.” Even if we’re in the conscious incompetence phase of learning about orca behaviour, there are expert theories. “What I think is most exciting about this is that actually, we don’t know at all,” says Tom Mustill, a biologist and film-maker, who wrote How to Speak Whale, after a humpback whale landed on his kayak (the jaw-dropping footage is on YouTube). The first question is easier to answer, or rather not to answer: we don’t know what they’re doing or why. But how wrong is that, and why does it appeal? If killer whales wanted to start attacking people, they could just start eating swimmers all over the place “What if we kissed while watching the orcas take back the ocean,” reads one tweet with 1m views, while a much-used image of an arm holding a microphone up to a captive orca has been repurposed endlessly to highly entertaining effect – I like one where it’s “singing” a bespoke version of the Meredith Brooks classic: “I’m a bitch / I’m an orca / Sinking yachts /Just off Majorca / I’m a sinner I’m a whale / Imma hit you with my tail.” We’re taking great pleasure in projecting extremely human narratives and motivations on orcas.
Browsing through orca memes, there’s an orca as the sickle in the hammer and sickle, with the headline “eat the rich”, and a Soviet-style graphic of a heroic orca emerging under a superyacht. Why do we like this story so much? Because we do: people – including me – love the idea of orcas attacking boats.
First, of course, what are the orcas doing? But the second is about another species entirely: us. There are two fascinating things about this.
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