2 young orcas ram sailboat off northern France — 800 miles from 'attack' hotspot

Orcas have rammed a sailboat off the coast of Brittany — a whopping 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) north from the Strait of Gibraltar, where the majority of orca attacks on boats have occurred.

The incident occurred July 16 off the coast of Guilvinec, a commune 40 miles (65 kilometers) southeast of Brest in northwestern France. The couple on board lost control of their boat — a 40-foot-long (12 meters) wooden pleasure craft — after two young orcas (Orcinus orca) broke the rudder, local newspaper Le Télégramme reported.

The couple alerted the local coastguard, who towed the sailboat safely back to harbor in Guilvinec.

The incident is one of nearly 700 physical interactions between orcas and boats recorded since July 2020 along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Europe and North Africa. Roughly half of those interactions caused mild to serious damage to the boats, according to a translated report published earlier this year in the journal Ingeniería Civil.

Orcas almost always target the rudder, which they have learned to break off with ruthless efficiency.

Research and observations have linked these interactions to a population of about 35 Iberian orcas. A total of 16 animals from this population — four adults and 12 juveniles — are thought to interact regularly with boats, but their motivation remains unclear.

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One hypothesis is that these orcas are bored "teenagers" looking for fun. But some scientists argue that interacting with boats is a freak behavior that emerged in response to a traumatic event.

"We think that there are arguments that indicate that an incident caused by an entrapment, in which a sailboat is involved, is feasible as a cause of psychological trauma that provokes a response on the part of a wild animal with high cognitive abilities, such as the orca," researchers wrote in the recent report.

The same team previously suggested that a female orca called White Gladis suffered a "critical moment of agony" and that she started ramming boats as a result. "If this hypothesis were true, the rest of the juvenile orcas would repeat the behavior by imitation," they wrote in the report.

It's unclear which population of orcas was behind the recent ramming off the coast of France. Iberian orcas follow their favorite Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) prey north from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Bay of Biscay in the summer, meaning they may have been hunting off the coast of Brittany.

But a different population also inhabits waters off west Scotland and northwest Ireland, where a case of an orca attacking a boat was reported last year. One expert at the time said the boat-ramming behavior could have "leapfrogged" from one population to the other.