Abnormal attacks by whales

Abnormal attacks by whales turn a series of frightening encounters into a problem of pattern and interpretation. The attacks are not evenly distributed across whale populations: evidence gathered by Leon Anawak and Alicia Delaware points to migratory animals as the aggressors, while resident whales remain peaceful. That distinction unsettles the idea of a simple, indiscriminate illness. It also directs the search away from the immediate scenes of attack and toward the distant ocean environments through which the migrants pass.

A pattern among migrants

The investigators identify transient orcas in the attacks and find no evidence of resident orcas taking part. Johnstone Strait, despite being full of kayaks, has been clear of attacks. The contrast makes location and population important: a busy stretch of water can remain safe while attacks occur elsewhere, and the threat appears associated with newcomers rather than with whales as a whole.

The pattern also extends beyond orcas. The Clayoquot Sound footage shows a Clayoquot Sound grey whale and two Vancouver Island ship-attacking humpback whales, all identified as transients. Records and fluke photographs sent to a Seattle institute confirm that the animals had been seen in Baja California several times in recent years and had spent the winter there. Their known movements give the investigators a concrete migration history to compare with the attacks. Delaware connects this finding to reports of large numbers of whales going missing in the middle of the Pacific while travelling north from California; the aggressive orcas, too, are associated with the open ocean.

In the Sound itself, later sightings reinforce—but do not prove—the distinction. Since the trouble began, orcas have been seen there only twice, and both sightings involved residents behaving without aggression. The water can seem almost undisturbed, with no sign of an attack, yet that calm offers no assurance that the broader danger has passed. The investigators’ theory remains provisional: the evidence suggests that migrants are affected, not that every migrant is dangerous or that the cause has been identified.

Residents at the rescue

The distinction becomes more than a statistical observation during the rescue of passengers from the sinking Lady Wexham. As a group of aggressive grey whales tries to ram the rescuers, two more grey whales appear beside them. They remain there until the attackers back off. The residents are described as an elderly local whale and another member of a small year-round population on the west coast; these whales are too old to make the gruelling migration.

Alicia Delaware recalls the episode as a possible intervention that helped the rescuers and passengers survive. Leon Anawak cautions against assigning human intentions to a whale. Delaware does not claim certainty either: she says only that the two residents seemed to keep the other whales at bay and were not aligned with the attackers. That restraint matters. The incident offers a striking contrast between local residents and incoming animals, but it does not establish what the whales intended or how they understood the rescue. In the investigators’ careful formulation, the residents appear harmless and seem to recognize that the others are behaving abnormally.

Selective attacks and a problem of intelligence

The danger also changes in character. John Ford recalls that the whales initially attacked anything afloat. Reports include attacks by fin and sperm whales as well as orcas, grey whales, and humpbacks. Later, their target selection appears more refined: the animals seem to distinguish what they can harm from what they cannot. Ford judges that the Whistler rescue tug is too large and powerful to be threatened by a whale. At sixty-three metres long and fifteen metres wide, with a bollard pull of 160 tonnes, it is far beyond what he expects a breaching whale to endanger. He expects a humpback might rock the vessel, but no more.

That calculation does not reassure him. The significance of the tug is precisely that the whales may recognize its limits as a target. Ford doubts that a rabies-like illness adequately explains behavior that seems increasingly capable of assessing objects and choosing how to respond. He is also unsure how the whales might react to the robot. The attacks therefore raise a question that simple reports of aggression cannot answer: whether the animals are merely more dangerous, or whether their conduct reflects a kind of intelligence that the investigators do not yet understand.

From investigation to force

The official response initially emphasizes caution. In a televised statement, Judith Li says that researchers will not speculate before they have concrete information and warns fishermen, industrialists, shipping lines, whale-watchers, and activists against taking matters into their own hands. Her stated position is that attacking animals would be foolish whether they are threatened or ill; the priority, she says, is to identify the cause and address it. The Allied Emergency Committee’s public message is to keep people out of the water and prevent the crisis from escalating.

As the wider emergency worsens, the response shifts toward coercive measures. Li reports that New York has been isolated and that confirmed crab sightings mean Washington must also be quarantined. Troops armed with flamethrowers are to surround key coastal cities while an antitoxin is developed. Military officials say they have no reliable way to control equipment in the depths: remotely operated vehicles return with severed cables, and four Russian scientists in MIR submersibles are rammed and sunk at a depth of a thousand metres. Dragnets are used to cull worms, and nets are placed in strategic coastal areas to keep marine life away.

Li then proposes using SURTASS LFA sonar against the whales, intending to deafen them until their eardrums burst. The move recasts the unexplained animal behavior as a hostile force to be answered in kind. It stands in sharp contrast to her earlier warning against violence and to the unresolved evidence about why the attacks are occurring. The pattern among migrants, the apparent restraint of residents, and the attackers’ growing selectivity all remain important clues, but none supplies a demonstrated cause. The attacks thus persist as both an ecological mystery and a test of whether human institutions can investigate an unfamiliar danger without turning uncertainty itself into a justification for war.