Since at least the 1960s there have been reports of orcas, also known as killer whales, stealing fish, particularly halibut, caught by fishing boats operating in the Bering Sea. Recently, the problem seems to be getting much worse.
The Alaska Dispatch News reports:
Fishermen say they can harvest 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of halibut in a single day, only to harvest next to nothing the next when a pod of killer whales recognizes their boat. The hooks will be stripped clean, longtime Bering Sea longliner Jay Hebert said in a phone interview this week. Sometimes there will be just halibut “lips” still attached to hooks — if anything at all.
“It’s kind of like a primordial struggle,” fisherman Buck Laukitis said about the orcas last week. “It comes at a real cost.”
The whales seem to be targeting specific boats, fisherman Jeff Kauffman said in a phone interview. FV Oracle Captain Robert Hanson said juvenile whales are starting to show up, and he thinks the mothers are teaching the young to go for the halibut and black cod the fishermen are trying to catch.
In a letter he sent to the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council last month, Hanson described a series of challenges he faced in recent years. On a trip to the continental shelf in April he said his crew was “harassed nonstop.” He wrote that they lost approximately 12,000 pounds of sellable halibut to the whales and wasted 4,000 gallons of fuel trying to outrun them.
Actually, I am on the side of the Orcas. We are systematically depleting the oceans of fish and if I were an Orca, I’d be pissed.
Hi you may like to know about Old Tom the orca at Eden NSW Australia he helped the whalers of the Davis shore whaling station find whales and let them to whales by taking the boat line in his mouth, as uncanny as it may seem when he died of natural causes his teeth were scarred with rope burns. His skeleton is on display in the Eden Maritime Museum for all to see.