Humpback whales involved in ship attacks

Humpback whales involved in ship attacks occupy two sharply different roles in the novel: familiar seasonal migrants whose absence alarms whale-watchers, and powerful animals implicated in attacks on vessels. Their return does not restore the old order. Instead, close encounters and recorded assaults make their behavior appear increasingly deliberate, while a possible link to an anomalous organism deepens the uncertainty about what is driving the change.

Migration and disappearance

The whales are part of a vast seasonal movement through the waters off Vancouver Island. In February, humpbacks and gray whales leave the warm waters around Baja California and Hawaii for summer feeding grounds in the Arctic, travelling roughly sixteen thousand kilometres through the Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea to the Chukchi Sea. When the days shorten, they head south again toward Mexico, where they can give birth beyond the reach of their deadliest enemy, the orca. Twice each year, large whale herds pass British Columbia, supporting busy whale-watching seasons in coastal towns such as Tofino, Ucluelet, and Victoria.

That expected migration gives the whales’ absence its force. On one rain-soaked excursion, Leon Anawak takes a full Zodiac of twelve passengers farther out to sea, but the group sees no fluke or fin. A blank day is unusual; a week without a sighting would be cause for concern, and such a week had never occurred before. Davie's Whaling Station normally offers repeat trips when customers fail to see a whale, but the familiar guarantee cannot explain why the animals have apparently gone astray. Anawak has spent the trip entertaining the passengers with local history, yet his attention turns increasingly to the whales’ whereabouts.

Their disappearance also has a practical ecological dimension. Gray whales and the humpbacks arrive near Vancouver after months without feeding, having relied on stored blubber during winter. They need to feed again, and Wickaninnish Bay offers gray whales a source of nutrition unavailable in the open ocean: the polychaete Onuphis elegans. Anawak therefore doubts that the whales can simply have moved farther offshore, where food is scarce. His concern is not only that the animals have vanished from view, but that their absence may interrupt a migration tied to particular feeding grounds.

The encounter with Anawak

When whales begin to return, their reappearance brings relief without resolving the mystery. Anawak remembers an earlier encounter in which two humpbacks approached his boat. Five whale backs had first drawn his attention; then a much larger shadow rose beside the Zodiac. One animal lifted itself vertically until its barnacled head towered above the rubber hull, its eye close to Anawak. He could not tell whether he was watching the whale or being watched by it.

Anawak reached out slowly and stroked its damp skin. The animal did not dive. Its eye shifted and returned to him, and it remained upright far longer than the brief surface display he would normally expect. A second, smaller head appeared on the other side of the boat and fixed him with the same steady attention. The encounter offers no proof of communication or purpose, but its duration and apparent focus resist easy dismissal as an ordinary sighting. Anawak, who is wary of reading human intentions into animal behavior, is left wondering what the whales wanted from him.

By 5 April, gray whales, humpbacks, orcas, and even minke whales are returning. The improvement in business at Davie's is welcome, but the animals’ arrival does not settle Anawak. He keeps returning to the memory of the two humpbacks, feeling that they had examined him as coolly and thoroughly as a specimen under laboratory observation. The contrast is central: the same migration that once promised an uncomplicated encounter with wildlife now carries the possibility that the animals are monitoring people for reasons they cannot understand.

From unusual behavior to attacks

Investigators distinguish between resident and transient whales rather than treating all animals as a single group. The recorded gray whale and two humpbacks involved in one attack are identified as transients; photographs of their flukes are checked against records from Seattle, and all three had been seen in Baja California in previous years. This identification matters because the attacks are not attributed indiscriminately to every whale on the coast. The Johnstone Strait, despite being full of kayaks, had been free of attacks, and the possibility that newcomers were responsible focuses attention on migrating animals and offshore orcas. Not all gray whales or humpbacks migrate, however, so a species label alone cannot account for the pattern.

The attacks also appear to change in character. At first, whales seem to strike at anything afloat. Later, they appear able to distinguish what they can and cannot damage, and the methods become more refined. John Ford finds that selectivity more disturbing than indiscriminate violence: it does not fit his expectation of a rabies-like illness and suggests an ability to assess targets. That interpretation remains a judgment about observed conduct, not proof of the whales’ intentions, but it makes the threat harder to explain as simple frenzy.

A satellite sequence presented by Sal Peak makes the danger concrete. It shows a yacht about twelve metres long on calm open water, with two men seated aft and two women lying on the foredeck. An adult humpback passes close by, followed by two more whales. After another pass, a whale rises vertically from the port side and crashes diagonally onto the yacht, splitting it in two. A second whale throws itself onto the wreckage. The images show debris and an expanding ring of disturbed water, but no sign of the people. Peak places the incident within a crisis that has spread beyond the American and Canadian coasts, leaving all but the largest ships driven from waters around the world.

The sequence also supports a proposed pattern of coordination. Peak describes large whales—including gray whales and humpbacks—attacking boats, with faster orcas sometimes taking care of survivors. He presents the attacks as spreading outward from incidents near Tofino, first to Baja California and then to Alaska. The description likens the spread to an epidemic, while Johanson challenges whether that comparison establishes a cause. The distinction is important: the expanding geography and repeated tactics are evidence of a pattern, but the epidemic framing is an interpretation rather than a demonstrated biological mechanism.

Possible causes and unresolved meaning

Anawak and his colleagues consider whether the attacks might be a protest against human pressures, including shipping traffic and the removal of forests. Logging can fill rivers with silt, damage salmon spawning grounds, and deprive resident orcas of prey. Yet Ford cautions that a toxin-based explanation focused on orcas does not account for gray whales and humpbacks apparently joining them. Anawak is reluctant to assign intention to animals, but he admits that the attacks give him the impression that the whales want to drive humans away. Delaware agrees, while distinguishing resident whales from animals that have travelled elsewhere and may have encountered whatever changed them. Their exchange marks a shift from treating the violence as isolated incidents to asking whether the migrating whales have undergone a shared alteration.

Later evidence offers a possible biological connection, though not a settled explanation. Tissue Anawak recovered after diving beneath the Barrier Queen is reported to match an amorphous jelly found in the brains of aggressive whales. A less concentrated form of the same material is also identified in lobster shells. Footage recorded by a URA dive robot shows a blue luminous cloud associated with whale behavior; the flashes do not appear to frighten or injure the whales, but the cloud seems to influence them. One proposal is that it stimulates the jelly in their brains or introduces the substance into their bodies through flashing, whip-like tentacles. The possibility that the tentacles are themselves part of the jelly is also raised. These links suggest a common unknown organism across several anomalies, but they do not establish exactly how it affects the whales or why attacks occur.

The humpbacks’ narrative significance rests on the gap between what can be seen and what can be known. Their migration can be plotted, their flukes compared with records, and their attacks captured by satellite imagery; none of this reveals what the animals perceive or intends to do. Their prolonged gaze at Anawak and their apparent selectivity during attacks unsettle the assumption that visible behavior can be reduced to familiar animal instinct. At the same time, the suspected blue organism complicates any simple opposition between whale agency and outside influence. The whales remain both endangered participants in a damaged marine environment and immediate dangers to people at sea, their changing conduct linking the local disappearance off Vancouver Island to a crisis far beyond it.