The time has come to put mankind in his place.

Summer 2023 really is shaping up to be the summer of the orca. In recent months, we’ve heard reports of anti-capitalist orcas attacking yachts near Gibraltar, and now it seems as though the orca revolution has spread to the seas around the UK.

Earlier this week, an orca attacked a yacht sailing in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland by repeatedly slamming into the vessel.

The orca continually rammed the boat, sending “soft shocks” through the hull, before dropping back and trailing the vessel as if “looking for the keel”. Rutten says the whale then disappeared but came back “at fast speed, twice or thrice ... and circled a bit.”

This sort of behaviour is normally unusual, but there has been a spate of orca attacks in recent months. Aggressive encounters were first recorded back in 2020, but according to the orca research group GTOA, orca-boat interactions off the Iberian coast jumped from 52 in 2020 to more than 200 in 2022. Notably, in May, an apparently coordinated orca attack sank three boats off the Iberian coast, and it’s estimated that around 20 ambushes have taken place in the area in the last month alone.

Speaking to Dazed earlier this month, Dr Luke Newell, who researches learning, behaviour, and communication among marine mammals at the University of St Andrews, explained that it’s “plausible” an orca named White Gladis had a traumatic experience with a boat, and subsequently taught other orcas to attack boats. Orcas are well-known to start and follow trends – one notable behavioural fad swept the orca world in 1987, where one started wearing striking hats made of dead salmon, inspiring two other killer whale pods to copy the trend.

Orcas of the world unite pic.twitter.com/AC50CLHNhL

— Enola Knezevic (@rhelune) June 14, 2023

Let us all learn from our Orca masters.