The Whale Who Started the Orca Uprising Was Pregnant and We're All Doomed
If you weren't worried about the fact that 2023 has been marked by a rash of killer whales attacking boats:
... you'd better think again.
Sure, you might be living in the middle of a nice, safe continent, far from the salt water and this is just some First World Problem of us lowlanders and shore dwellers. If so, you're deluding yourself. This is no time for NIMBY thinking.
Because no matter where you are and how you live, you need the sea. It's 75% of the planet surface. Everything you live off of, from food to fuel to computer chips for your car, come to you across the vast oceans. And since boats were first invented, whoever dominated the seas became the rulers of the great empires. From the Athenians to the Venetians, to the Portuguese and Spanish explorers to the British and then the US. The most mysterious collapse of a civilization was the end of the Bronze Age. Advanced trading societies all around the western Mediterranean fell into ruin practically overnight. And all the records show is that it came as the hands of someone they referred to as The Sea People.
So if you think you can just sit there in Chicago, Kansas City, Denver or wherever and say, "Killer whales are not my problem, bro" you are sadly mistaken and ignorant of history. And to steal a line from Jaws, you can't ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bite you in the ass. Figuratively, if not literally.
Because we along ago learned about White Gladis, the first to attack boats and began teaching others how it's done, like the Caesar from this Planet of the Apes:
But now we've come to discover grave news that threatens us all. White Gladis is a randy little bugger. And like every sea creature we're aware of, she is not into using protection:
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Source - White Gladis was thought to have been pregnant when she first started ramming into boats, and has even taken her newborn calf with her on terror expeditions.
The matriarch is among a pod of killer whales that have been attacking boats off the coast of Spain and Portugal since the summer of 2020.
The so-called 'orca-uprising', believed to have been instigated by White Gladis, has seen the species ramming and circling ships before wrenching away their rudders. …
Gladis is thought to have given birth in 2021.
Yet, rather than settling into motherhood, she continued her destructive endeavors, bringing her calf along with her.
It's impossible to overstate how bad this is for humanity. Which, as it just so happens, is by far my favorite of all the species.
As anyone who saw the documentary BlackFish, the one that shamed SeaWorld into no longer breeding orcas or putting them on display, when one of these aggressive ones has a baby, that baby is born with the same aggressive tendencies as its parent, male or female. One of the great scandals the film reveals is that the international whale sperm trade didn't discriminate between the ones that had attacked their trainers and the passive, docile ones. (If you saw the video of how they collect the sperm, you will never unsee it. Believe that.) So these parks were breeding big, angry, swimming time bombs all around the world, ready to go off at any time. With a hatred for humans basically encoded into their DNA.
That's just in captivity. Now we know that the queen of the uprising is making her own pups and raising them to be just as anti-human as she is. White Gladis is the cetacean version of the Pirate Queen of Ireland, Grace O'Malley, who raided and plundered British Merchant ships well into her third trimester. She certainly didn't raise a bunch of compliant, submissive pussies. And there's no way on God's green sea that White Gladis will either. Now it's only a matter of time before her children have children. And they join up with the offspring of all those SeaWorld whales. And before we know it, the oceans will be teeming with orcas who will not be governed. Then we'll be screwed for sure. Although I'll argue, we already are.