Orca

Orcas in the novel occupy a double role: they are animals with distinct populations, diets, and vulnerabilities, yet they also become part of a wave of attacks that makes the sea seem newly hostile to people. Their behavior unsettles Leon Anawak precisely because it contradicts what he believes about them. The death of Genghis, a large male Orca, offers a quieter but consequential counterpoint: alongside the spectacle of attack, the story presents Orcas as exposed to the environmental toxins affecting the waters off British Columbia.

Identity and ecology

The Orca identified as Genghis was listed in a research database as J-19. His distinctive dorsal fin, curved like a scimitar, made him recognizable to Leon Anawak, who had studied marine mammals. At more than ten metres long, he was one of the largest transient Orcas Anawak had encountered. Genghis was past his prime but still powerful; the patches on his skin and his closed or obscured eyes became part of the scene in which the research team examined his death.

The autopsy also locates Orcas within a varied marine food web. Genghis’s stomach contained a partly digested seal. Ray Fenwick explained that transient and offshore Orcas eat sea lions, porpoises, and dolphins, and can prey even on baleen whales. This differs from the diet of resident Orcas, a distinction that matters later when Anawak considers whether a shared environmental cause could account for attacks by several whale species. The novel does not treat Orcas as a uniform population: diet and ecological niche complicate any single explanation for their behavior.

The marine setting shapes what humans can know about them. The continental shelf, the underwater continuation of the landmass, gives way to deeper regions that remain less familiar to science than outer space. Near the surface and shore, people can observe and study whales; beyond those comparatively accessible waters lies a harder-to-read environment. The sea is therefore not merely the Orcas’ habitat but a limit on human observation, one that makes the animals’ changing behavior difficult to interpret.

Genghis and environmental vulnerability

On 11 April, on Vancouver Island in Clayoquot Sound, Anawak encounters Genghis’s body and is angered by the sight. John Ford, who directs the Vancouver Aquarium’s marine-mammal research programme, has asked for the autopsy to take place on the beach rather than behind closed doors. He expects the public setting to draw students and journalists and to make the examination feel less distant. The decision turns the animal’s death into a public account of Orca anatomy and health, with news organizations gathered around the researchers.

During the examination, Fenwick reports that Orcas in the region have increasingly shown immune-system collapse and died of bacterial infections. Genghis was twenty-two—older than a juvenile, but younger than the roughly thirty years reached by many healthy Orcas—and there are no external signs of a struggle. Fenwick’s assessment is that an infection probably killed him. The finding shifts attention from visible violence to a less immediately apparent vulnerability: an animal can appear powerful and still be undermined by failing health.

Anawak supplies an environmental context. Toxicological research, he explains, has found high contamination by PCBs and other pollutants in Orcas off the coast of British Columbia. Some measured PCB levels have reached 150 parts per million, a level he says would be disastrous for a human immune system. The account does not establish that pollution alone caused Genghis’s death, but it links the individual case to a broader pattern of contamination and immune decline. The press receives a striking story; the underlying evidence also points to damage accumulating within the marine food web.

Attacks and the collapse of expectation

The attacks make the Orca’s familiar relationship with humans seem suddenly unreliable. During the violence around the Blue Shark and the Lady Wexham, Anawak helps pull survivors from the water with Susan Stringer and Alicia Delaware. Orcas move among the vessels and swimmers, and the rescue boat is itself overturned. For Anawak, the danger is not simply that a large animal can overpower a small craft. The behavior violates a basic expectation built from his professional experience: wild Orcas had not attacked people, and he had not understood them to attack boats.

That contradiction drives Anawak’s search for a cause. After the attack, he considers whether some disease—perhaps a rabies-like infection—could account for what is happening. But attacks involve Humpback whale, Orcas, and Grey whale, and the variety of animals makes a single infection difficult to explain. He also considers whether PCBs and toxins in food might disrupt their instincts. This possibility, too, meets an ecological complication: Orcas consume contaminated salmon and other animals, whereas Grey whale and Humpback whale feed on plankton. Their different diets and metabolisms leave Anawak with evidence of a crisis but no simple mechanism that explains it.

The distinction between observed fact and explanation remains important. Anawak’s knowledge does not disappear, but it no longer predicts what the animals will do. The Orcas become both subjects of scientific inquiry and immediate agents of danger; the researchers’ established categories—diet, population, health, and behavior—offer clues, not control.

Rescue and unresolved behavior

During one rescue, Greywolf steers toward people in the water while Orcas close around the overturned Zodiac inflatable boat. Anawak and the others pull Stringer and further survivors aboard, but the danger continues. Later, as Greywolf swims toward a rescue boat, an Orca follows him. Anawak helps haul him aboard; the Orca circles and swims away without attacking him. The moment does not resolve the threat. Instead, it introduces a sharp contrast: the animals can pursue a person and imperil a rescue, yet in this instance the encounter ends without the expected attack.

Anawak wonders why the Orca did not strike. Greywolf’s own confidence that the whales will not hurt him stands uneasily beside the assaults on boats and the peril faced by the swimmers. The narrative supplies no definitive explanation for the Orca’s departure. Its restraint therefore remains part of the uncertainty, rather than evidence that the broader danger has passed.

Narrative significance

The Orcas’ role is not reducible either to monstrous antagonism or to innocent victimhood. Genghis’s death foregrounds contamination and declining health; the attacks make the animals’ actions a direct human emergency. These strands coexist without a settled causal answer. Anawak can identify the pollutants, compare diets, and recognize anomalous behavior, but each insight also exposes the limits of what he can infer.

That uncertainty is reinforced by the novel’s broader questions about intelligence and collective life. Karen Weaver’s research considers how intelligent life might be constrained by body size, cell number, and the capacity of a nervous system; later, the team models how mutable DNA could enable cells to learn as part of a collective. These discussions concern the Yrr, not a demonstrated explanation of Orca behavior. Their relevance is thematic: they challenge human assumptions about what intelligence must look like and what kinds of beings can act with purpose. Against that wider inquiry, the Orcas remain animals whose actions humans can observe but cannot yet read with confidence. The sea’s depth, ecological complexity, and restricted visibility make that gap consequential: people confront the animals before they understand the conditions shaping the encounter.