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‘Orcas are psychos,’ quipped a close friend recently. He wasn’t joking, nor was he ill-informed. In fact, he is probably the world’s leading historian of whales and people. He had just watched a BBC Earth clip, narrated by David Attenborough, in which three killer whales separate a male humpback calf from his mother in the waters of Western Australia. The video’s closing footage, with two of the orcas escorting the naive youngster to his imminent death, resembles nothing so much as a kidnapping:

Many people might regard my friend’s comment as anachronistic. Following the first live display at marine parks in the mid-1960s, the frightening reputation of orcas vanished almost overnight. For decades after, when most people thought of the species, they pictured commercialised versions such as Shamu or the eponymous orca of Free Willy (1993) – virtual sea pandas. That warm and fuzzy image survived Blackfish (2013), whose viewers generally accepted the documentary’s thesis that orca attacks on trainers were due to the evils of captivity.

Recent encounters in the wild have only cemented this view. Researchers have observed orcas apparently offering gifts to human swimmers, as well as sophisticated group behaviours such as food sharing. Even the recent trend of killer whales disabling and sinking yachts near Gibraltar seems to have elicited sentiments of environmental guilt and socioeconomic catharsis rather than fear – at least from people not on the boats. Orcas have decided to ‘eat the rich’ and ‘take back the ocean’, declared the Twitterverse. The top marine predators were taking revenge for the harm humans had done them.

Is this the same creature that abducts whale calves? It seems the stuff of cognitive dissonance. After decades of scientific attention and public enthusiasm, we thought we knew orcas. But even now, they still offer surprises and contradictions. Captivity taught us long ago that individual killer whales have distinct personalities, but since then researchers have identified separate populations around the world, marked by unique linguistic and food cultures. They’ve observed apparent altruism, playfulness and curiosity within pods and populations, but also seemingly sadistic cruelty and a willingness to torment prey – and even to commit infanticide toward their own species. These discoveries have only complicated our understanding of who – or what – orcas really are.

Yet perhaps what shapes our perceptions of this apex predator has less to do with scientific findings than with our own shifting cultural priorities. A historical view of our relationship with orcas reveals that they have often served as a Rorschach test for humanity’s conflicted attitudes toward the sea. These creatures evolved to navigate an aquatic and acoustic world that is fundamentally alien to us, so we have long struggled to comprehend their behaviour. The question, then, is not whether we can ever truly know a species so unlike ourselves, but whether we might better understand ourselves through them.

If the Twitterverse is right, and orcas really are taking revenge, I’m glad they didn’t start earlier. In the 1970s, my father, a fisherman and biologist, helped capture killer whales on both sides of the United States-Canada border. He even worked briefly for SeaWorld, where my mother and I test-drove the first Shamu stroller in 1976. As I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, often working as a commercial fisherman myself, I watched my dad wrestle with the changing meaning of his past, as orcas became iconic and their capture morphed into our region’s original sin.

The author with his mother, Jan, at SeaWorld in 1976

That history loomed over my childhood. In the late 1970s, we lived on a fishing boat in southeast Alaska where I spent most days rowing feral in my inflatable raft. My parents cautioned me to avoid bears and showed me the glowing eyes of wolves at night, but they never warned me about orcas. For those who haven’t seen them in the wild, the aura of the species is difficult to describe. They enter each body of water as if they own the place and have never known fear. As a five-year-old, I found them mesmerising but a bit unnerving.

‘What are those, mom?’ I asked, as black fins sliced the water nearby.

‘Don’t worry. They’re just killer whales.’

‘Killer whales?!’ I screamed. ‘Should I row back?’

‘No. They won’t hurt you. It’s just a name. Dad has fed them with his hands.’

The author’s father, John, feeding a captured orca in Pedder Bay, British Columbia, 1973

Rapid changes in culture, media and technology have sequentially reframed the ocean’s apex predator

I encountered a very different creature on the small screen in 1984. Left alone one summer evening, I flipped to HBO, where I came upon the thriller Orca: The Killer Whale (1977). I had jumped in during an especially violent scene. In the waters of Newfoundland, a fisherman named Nolan, played by Richard Harris, attempts to take a killer whale for captivity, accidentally harpooning a pregnant female. After being hauled aboard, the mortally injured animal miscarries her foetus as her nearby mate shrieks in anguish. For the rest of the movie, the male orca pursues the fisherman, in one scene pulling his waterfront home into the sea and biting off the leg of a character played by Bo Derek, and eventually hurling Nolan to his death against an iceberg. Although an attempt to piggyback on the success of Jaws (1975), it is a very different film. In contrast to Steven Spielberg’s drone-like great white, the antagonist of Orca is a moral being out to avenge his family – a fact the guilt-ridden Nolan fully appreciates. At 10 years old, I understood little of this, but the film left me feeling unsettled and nauseous. Not only was this vengeful wraith quite different from the orcas I had seen in captivity and in the wild, but Nolan could have been my dad.

In truth, popular perceptions of killer whales have always told us more about people in a particular time and place than about the species itself. Rapid changes in culture, media and technology have sequentially reframed the ocean’s apex predator, often to the bemusement of marine mammologists. In the countercultural cauldron of late 1960s and early ’70s Vancouver, for example, the scientist-turned-activist Paul Spong urged listeners to adopt the term ‘orca’, believing humans would feel a deep spiritual connection to the species if only they eschewed the phrase ‘killer whale’. Etymologically, it was a silly argument. The name ‘killer whale’ stems from an erroneous translation of the Spanish asesino de ballenas – killer of whales: it was never meant to imply predation on humans. Likewise, ‘orca’ was hardly a new-age term: it is short for Orcinus orca – which can be translated as ‘demon from the underworld’ – surely a more frightening phrase than ‘killer whale’ in the days when students learned their Latin. For centuries, the men who worked the sea........

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