[imagesource: Wellard et al / PLOSONE]

Killer whales look like the pandas of the ocean, except that they aren’t at all.

They can be rather ruthless, in fact, and are the likely culprits behind the disappearance of the Cape’s great white sharks.

A new video that’s surfing the web shows a pod of killer whales scaring some sailors aboard a ship in the Strait of Gibraltar, off the coast of Morocco.

The sailors were seen using poles and flares to try and get rid of the whales, which managed to break off the boat’s rudder.

The captain of the boat, Antonio Busse, had been on watch duty the evening of April 3 when he noticed that around four whales were banging into the sides of the boat.

In a panic, some other sailors joined him in trying to scare the whales off by throwing things into the water and shouting at them.

Business Insider adds more:

At one point, the sailor filming the video can be heard shouting: “Look, they hit the wheel a bit! They don’t like the wheel, they always go for the wheel.”

Only after someone lights a flare and throws it into the water do the orcas move away.

Busse, who has sailed across the world, said that the incident had been very scary, adding that “something like this had never happened before” in his lifetime…

“I have been in Antarctica and I have never seen something like this,” he said.

Despite the missing rudder, the boat managed to continue on its journey and anchor in the Spanish port of Tarifa.

Here’s the video:

I don’t want to dismiss the danger of the situation for everyone involved (whales and people included), but it’s definitely a little amusing when the one sailor shouts to the whale in English to “get off the boat,” explaining with some laughter that it’s “because they don’t understand”.

Well yes, probably because they’re whales, though, and not because they don’t speak Spanish.

It turns out, the phenomenon of orcas causing damage to boats is becoming increasingly common in the Strait of Gibraltar.

In some instances, they have even injured crew members:

Researchers told the Observer that it was not unusual for orcas, which are highly social and curious animals, to follow boats or even playfully interact with them and that ramming the rudder is not unheard of.

The truth is, we don’t know enough about the reasons behind some of the behaviours of these wild sea creatures.

Ruth Esteban, the head of international relations for the Orca Atlantica Working Group, who studies orcas, told Insider:

“We don’t like to call them attacks because it comes across as more playful. We still don’t fully know why they do this but from watching videos of the different interactions, it is obvious they behave differently depending on the speed of the boat or the type of boat,” said Esteban.

“When we watch these videos, for us, it doesn’t look like they’re ‘attacks.'”

In a similar way that sharks are misunderstood, killer whales could just be bored and orca-strating a game (see what I did there?).

They could even be trying to tell us something about the state of the oceans.

[source:businessinsider]