Seen a bunch of people sharing this one idea that the Iberian orcas are attacking sailing boats because one of them was previously “traumatised”.

I think it needs to be said that this is a fringe theory and widely regarded by lots of people studying this emergent behaviour as implausible.

For a start, orcas swim at 3 times the speed a sailboat travels at. As far as they’re concerned, they are essentially stationary objects. Secondly, orcas weigh more than sailboats, and if they wanted to sink them, they could, easily, but they aren’t doing that.

What the orcas are doing is biting rudders. The sinkings that have happened have been secondary to that: water ingress caused by damage to the rudder stock.

The leading theory is that this started as hunting practice. The Iberian orcas eat tuna, and they hunt them by biting their fins off so they can’t swim away. Sailboat rudders superficially resemble tuna fins, and so are good practice.

The behaviour started with a few young males about 3-4 years ago. It’s now spread and around 15 of them are doing it. It’s nearly all young males.

It appears that what started out as practice has now become the orca equivalent of that arsehole on TikTok walking into people’s houses: they appear to be doing it because their mates do it, and they think it’s funny.

Sadly inaction by, mostly Spanish authorities is leading to people increasingly taking things into their own hands. Sailboat owners share information on orca locations and are increasingly travelling in convoys, WWII style. Initially putting the boat into reverse on engine seemed to work, but they’ve got wise to that, and so an arms race is developing. The current technique which seems to work pretty much all the time is to throw firecrackers into the water.

They’re starting to move on to other types of boats too. Small fishing boats are increasingly being attacked.

This is not going to end well. Either they will finally kill someone, which will likely result in a cull, or they’re going to fuck with the wrong boat. In a few months the tuna migrate north towards Normandy. The orcas follow them. If they start attacking French fishing boats, I can’t imagine those guys taking any shit. Sail boats are pleasure craft and our response has been to try and avoid them, but that’s not going to be the case with fishing boats, and the French are not known for calm and gentle responses to things that threaten their livelihoods.

Watch this space, I guess. The hope is that this behaviour is a fad that will go out of fashion. If it doesn’t, it’s going to end up in deaths; possibly humans, definitely orcas.

Some time ago, I shared a post in which I likened TERFs to pubic lice and bedbugs.

I now realise this was wholly inappropriate and needlessly distressing.

I would like to unreservedly apologise to all pubic lice and bedbugs.

Sarah Brown

2023-03-20 00:57:03

So the Liberal Democrats overwhelmingly told their resident TERFs to go do one at their spring conference. They voted by around 9 to 1 to not even hear their hatred and simply remove it from the agenda.

The transphobes are showing their usual complete and total lack of introspection and utterly failing to take the hint.

This is a lesson for us all. Just constantly frustrating them and hoping they go away does not work with these people. If you have them in your organisation, they will not leave by themselves.

TERFs are like bedbugs, or pubic lice: once you’ve got them you need to actively make them go away.

it’s best to make your environment as hostile as possible, to try and prevent them arriving in the first place. if you get them, they will multiply and before you know it, you have an infestation that will not fucking shut up about trans people and “females’ sex based rights” (yes, they talk like Ferengi, or incels. They can’t seem to quite manage to successfully mimic actual human communication and this is a good way to spot them if you aren’t sure whether or not you have an infestation).

If tou leave it too long, they start sending pretend legal threats. it’s best to get rid of them before this point because dealing with this will become very time consuming. They’ll also stalk you and probably your friends and family too.

The Lib Dems did well this weekend, but they still have a largely untreated infestation, and it would have saved them a lot of trouble if they’d nipped this in the bud about 5 years ago.