In the third such documented incident in the last two years, a pod of orcas on Monday went to work on a vessel off the coast of Bilbao in Spain, disabling a French sailboat and prompting a rescue mission by the country’s coast guard, Euro Weekly News reports and leading scientists to speculate that one badass killer whale is teaching others that it’s fun to fuck with human boats.
A member of the unidentified sailboat’s crew told France’s TF1 that the whales at first seemed harmless – until they trashed the boat’s rudder rending them dead in the water. “After five minutes of this situation, and seeing that they wanted to continue having fun with the boat and that they were going to break something else, we called the rescue team, ‘Mayday, mayday,’” the man said.
Portuguese marine biologist and University of Aveiro Professor Alfredo Lopez Fernandez says he and his colleagues now have a name for the ringleader of the anti-boat pod: White Gladys. Fernandez says she suffered a collision with a vessel in 2020 and has since been eyed as the one colliding back. “That traumatized orca is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat,” the scientist continued, warning that Gladys’s bloodlust is spreading to other pods.