The unexpected cause of increased marine mammal interactions

Disabled and sunk ships. Frightened sailors. Not because of sharks – but because of whales and orca.

Scientists seeing an increase in unexpected large marine mammal interactions. Why?

Today, On Point: The unexpected cause of increased marine mammal interactions.

Naomi Rose, senior scientist, Marine Mammal Biology with the Animal Welfare Institute.

Lucie Leprince, French YouTuber. Her sailboat was disabled by orcas off the coast of Portugal.

Alex Zerbini, senior scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Climate Action, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies at the University of Washington.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: By now, you’ve probably seen video of that supposed whale “attack” off the coast of New Hampshire late last month.

NEWS BRIEF: Wild scenes off the coast of New Hampshire as a whale breaches, and you can see it capsized that boat. It is incredible. As the whale came down on the boat, both people on board were sent into the water. Thankfully, everybody's okay tonight.

CHAKRABARTI: The video, shot by two teenage boys off the coast of Rye, New Hampshire, shows a humpback whale surging up from the water and slamming down on a fishing boat not far from where the teens were also fishing. Here’s sound from the moment where the whale’s body crashes down on the boat’s stern. The bow comes up out of the water, and two fishermen are thrown into the sea.

(CRASHING SOUND)

CHAKRABARTI: Greg Paquette and Ryland Kenney, both New Hampshire fishermen, told Boston television station WCVB no more than three seconds passed between when they first saw the juvenile humpback breech to the moment it crashed into their boat’s transom.

We didn't see him for a couple of minutes. And then the next thing we knew, he popped up and just landed right on the transom of the boat.

I dropped the rod, and I just looked up and I was just like, I just saw the boat tipping and I said, the only way to get, avoid this is just to jump horizontally away from that. It's a miracle that I'm alive and I don't know what was going through my head.

It was just kind of survival. Truly grateful to them and their quick thinking because they were the ones who were making the video and they just, whoa, dropped everything, zoomed right over and plucked us out.

CHAKRABARTI: Paquette there thanking teenagers Colin and Wyatt Yager of Maine who were also in the area to fish. They immediately dropped their phones and their rods and rushed over to help the men in the water.

Alright. So what exactly happened here? The quick conclusion is that the 30-foot humpback was somehow targeting the boat. But that of course isn’t true. Humpbacks don’t do that. I’ve mentioned “fishing” a bunch of times already because, like Paquette and Ryland and the Yager brothers, that’s exactly what the humpback was there for, too. The men said the fishing was the best they’d seen in a decade. The whale probably thought so too.

As Dianna Schulte, the co-founder and director of research at the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, says, the humpback wasn’t angry. It was hungry.

DIANNA SCHULTE: The boat just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's all it was. There was nothing malicious. It was just a hungry whale. In an area, there was a lot of small recreational fishing boats around too, because the, the whale was feeding on the menhaden, also known as pogies or bunker, a small type of bait fish. Whales like to eat the small fish, and then the fishermen were trying to catch the striped bass that were also feeding on the small fish, everyone was kind of all in the same neighborhood together just trying to get some food. 

CHAKRABARTI: Another video obtained by New Hampshire television station WMUR shows the moment from a different angle. In that one, you clearly see the fish spilling from the humpback’s open mouth.

There it is again! The whale coming back up, still feeding on fish in that exact same area where all this happened. You can see the fish being scattered as the whale comes up and feeds. And there are more boats nearby.

Actually, pretty close, too.

CHAKRABARTI: So, no whale attack. Although Ryland and Paquette say there’s a lesson to be learned from their experience – stay even farther away from whales than you think is necessary, and wear a life jacket.

However, the reason why this incident caught so many people’s attention is that there has been a dramatic rise in marine mammal encounters in recent years. Specifically, orca.

Since 2020, orca have been disabling and sometimes sinking ships in the Strait of Gibraltar. It’s happened close to a thousand times in the last four years.

VIDEO: Oh my God, they're going to get the rudder.

CHAKRABARTI: This is from last summer. A pod of orcas approached the multimillion-dollar VO65 sailboat darting through the Strait of Gibraltar in world famous Ocean Race. The professional Dutch crew was rattled. They put a waterproof camera below the surface and can clearly see the orca nosing and then biting their rudder.

In this case, that’s all the orca did, and the crew kept racing. Other sailors haven’t been so lucky.

And as we mentioned, this has happened almost a thousand times. And the interactions are still going on.

So, of course, we want to know why. What are these beautiful, intelligent creatures doing?

Naomi Rose joins me now. She’s the Senior Marine Mammal Scientist with the Animal Welfare Institute and has served on the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission for more than two decades. She’s studied whales for even longer and helped write a report on these specific orca interactions. Naomi, welcome to On Point.

NAOMI ROSE: Hey, Meghna. It's nice to be on air with you.

CHAKRABARTI: Now this, as I said, these interactions have been going on since 2020. When's the first that you heard of them?

ROSE: I was contacted by the British Yachting Association, cold. Somebody Googled my name and wanted to know what was going on and what sort of advice he could give British mariners who were taking vessels from the UK down through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. A lot of these are crews that are delivering brand new ships that are made in the UK. And they were reporting these interactions, and they wanted to know what they should do. So he reached out to me.

CHAKRABARTI: I understand they were freaking out at the time because it was very unexpected.

ROSE: Oh, they're still freaking out. They're still freaking out. You can just imagine how terrifying it might be to suddenly have a group of the ocean's top predator ramming your boat. And yeah, these guys, these crews, these manly men were pretty freaked out. And they were looking for advice and I offered the advice that I actually think would work if people could do this under the circumstances, is nothing, do nothing, drop to the deck, play dead.

Do not give the whales any satisfaction, any gratification at all, just do nothing. As I said, that's pretty hard to do when the ocean's top predator is trying to break off your rudder. And so it's rarely what happens. There's always some reaction the whales get and that is actually why I think they're still doing it.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I want us to put a pin in that thought because I want to come back to it. Because the idea that the whales are actually observing human reactions indicates a level of intelligence that is awe inspiring. So let's go through some of the theories that have been put forth, theories which you and other marine scientists have discounted since, but I want to just quickly name them.

First of all, there was the orcas are taking revenge on humans. Is there any evidence that the orca could be having, could be showing concerted aggressive behavior on humans for our despoiling of the seas?

ROSE: There is absolutely no evidence for that. For one thing, it's just here. This is an extremely, and I know you shouldn't put adjectives for the word unique.

Unique is unique. This is a unique situation there. This isn't happening anywhere else. This isn't happening anywhere else with other orcas. This is just here in the Iberian Peninsula, and then the water surrounding it. This particular population is critically endangered. There's less than 40 of them.

There's fewer than 40 of them. And these are the guys that seem to have this fascination with sailboats under 45 feet with these spade rudders. They're called spade rudders because of the way they're shaped and they're fascinated by them. So this is not for revenge. Otherwise, all workers would be, it'd be spreading and it's not spreading.

I really want to emphasize that. So the other reason we don't think it's revenge is because, no particular animal is doing it. It's up to 15, 16 animals now in a group of less than 40. It's about half the population is participating now, and it is, they're not trying to sink the vessels.

Only eight, and that's a lot for the eight folks who lost their boats, but only eight out of, as you pointed out, almost a thousand interactions. So that's not the goal. The goal is to ram the rudder. That's it.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It makes a lot of sense because it's not just in the Strait of Gibraltar that we've been ruining the oceans.

That's happening everywhere.

ROSE: Oh, yes.

CHAKRABARTI: What about, and this is a really busy shipping area, as well. Is it, could it be that there's been some kind of change in behavior because of the boat traffic and the other interactions that the orcas have been actually subjected to, because of so many vessels in the area?

ROSE: It's actually the opposite. And this is fascinating to me. Up to very recently, say six, seven, eight years ago, these animals were highly threatened by lack of food. The bluefin tuna that they specialize on, that's their prey preference, was critically endangered as well. They had crashed.

And this was true for the industrial fishing folks who were targeting the bluefin tuna. They couldn't find any. The whales couldn't find any. Life was on the edge for these guys, and they found a bluefin tuna. They had to chase it to exhaustion and eat it. They had no time for anything else.

This was a working population, desperately looking for food all the time. So the governments involved got savvy and they put in restrictions and regulations for the bluefin tuna industry. And in a rare case of a victory in conservation, the bluefin tuna rebounded. So now there's bluefin tuna aplenty for the industrial fishing folks and for the orcas.

So for the first time, a generation of orcas, juveniles and adolescents of now, have leisure time. And we actually think this absence of need to just focus on eating all the time, or focus on hunting all the time, has given them the opportunity to be kids again. Think about that.

CHAKRABARTI: Be kids again. Okay. We have to take a break here in just a second. So if you could summarize in one word what you think is going on here. What would that word be?

ROSE: It's a game.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: We talked to a sailor who is amongst that 1,000, or whose boat was amongst that 1,000 boats that have been toyed with by these orca. And it happened in 2023 when Lucie Leprince, her father and a friend, were sailing off the coast of Portugal.

It was early morning when Lucie was suddenly woken up.

LUCIE LEPRINCE: It was around 7 a.m. and I was sleeping. My father was alone conducting the boat. And then I heard him scream. He was calling me. He was saying, there are orcas, come quick. There were four orcas. One was very big, like very big. One was very small and two middle sized.

So it was the first thing I thought when I saw them so close to the boat is that, wow, that's amazing to see such beautiful creatures so close. It's the first time in my life. I'm so lucky.

There is a protocol that we try to follow. So what we knew at that time, it was to stop the boat and stop every electronic thing that might create waves. We were really not being in control of the boat. It was the orcas that were moving the boat.

First, I was feeling some kind of fascination towards orcas, because it was so big and beautiful. But after a few minutes, I could feel my body being really tensed. We were all very quiet and the more there was staying, the more we would feel this tension.

We saw quite quickly that they were starting to go near the rudder in the water and we could hear little crack sounds because they were like eating the rudder with their teeth. They were focusing on the rudder. Which was getting, it was getting scarier and scarier because we were very worried. So if it breaks, it can create a hole in the boat and water can arrive.

Also, they were bumping their heads on the boat. So we were really moving in all directions, not really being able to do anything than sit here and watch. After 15 minutes, they broke the rudder.

One of the orcas, when they broke the rudder, afterwards they put the rudder on top of their nose. Like a dog or any other animal. And they were trying to drown the rudder and play with it. So it really felt like a game. When they left, the first thing we did was to check if there was no water coming into the boat.

So we saw that there was no water. So we were relieved. I think we could not really believe what happened at that time. And I remember saying to my father, I should have cried.

CHAKRABARTI: French Sailor and YouTuber Lucie Leprince. Lucie, her father and her father's friend were able to navigate their disabled boat to shore. They used the motor and broken rudder to find a small town outside of Lisbon where they got their boat repaired. Naomi, we didn't actually, we did not plan this, but Lucie used the exact same word.

ROSE: Exactly. Oh my gosh.

CHAKRABARTI: You just did. So tell me, what did you hear in her story that can, that indicates to you that this is a game? This is orca play?

ROSE: Yeah. I'm so glad she noticed that. I'm so glad that one of the mariners who was, of course, quite frightened, I'm sure, was both fascinated and understood it was a game.

I think that's amazing. And it tells you, you mentioned earlier, Ooh, that indicates a level of intelligence. That's pretty fascinating. It is. These guys are so smart, and they spend a lot of time doing their job, which is finding food, but when they have a lot of food, which they now do in the Iberian Peninsula, they have time to invent games, and they're so smart and they're so social.

They live with their families their whole lives, that they do actually have to keep themselves occupied when they're not doing their job. Just like we do, think of all the games we invent. They do the same thing. What they also do is called fads. Just like our fads, fashion fads. I've just was reading a story this morning about jorts.

Jeans shorts, it's a new fashion fad. So they come and they go, yeah, fads. That's the sort of thing that makes them fads, right? They come and they go. And that's what usually happens with orcas. And this is the one that makes everybody laugh. One of the most famous fads was in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

They started wearing their prey, salmon, on their heads.

CHAKRABARTI: I know this one. It's crazy.

ROSE: This is clearly purposeless. Clearly at no point in the world, this is their food and they're playing with it. But it faded away. It lasted only about a year and then disappeared for 20 years, and then it came back.

Fads come and go, and they do with orcas, as well. And so this is a fad, but it's not fading. Why is it not fading? Why is it still going on four years later? And I think it's because every time they do it, the response they get from the vessel is different. This fad isn't getting boring and that's a problem, because we really want them to get bored. Why is it a game? Why do we think it's a game? Primarily for a number of reasons, but primarily because of who's participating. It's mostly juveniles and adolescents. The big whale Lucie mentioned was probably one of the mothers, an adult female, they're pretty big, but who doesn't participate are the big adult males.

And big adult males do play, but not very much, they're the old codgers and they get bored easily and they just don't think games are worth their time. And they spent a lot of time pretty much just swimming around. I've seen adult males when I was out in the field with orcas, swimming in straight lines forever and ever, they're just like, yeah. And so they don't participate in this behavior. So it's not aggression, because they would be front and center if it was aggression. It is mostly juveniles and adolescents. As I said, they leave after a while. Look what happened with Lucie and her father. They left. And I don't even know that damaging the rudder is the game.

I think just ramming the rudder is the game. But certainly, once they break it off, then they play with the piece. They don't keep ramming the boat. They play with the piece that they broke off. They wear it on their head. They push it around and then they swim away. So aggression's not the point here.

CHAKRABARTI: You said it was even down to a specific rudder shape.

And is that, do we know why?

ROSE: No idea. It doesn't look like prey particularly. It could look like a bluefin tuna, but only if it was standing on his tail. It's not the right shape really for a swimming bluefin. No, we don't really know why, they have rammed other boats. They've rammed motorboats.

They've rammed fishing boats, but very rarely. I can't remember what the percentage is. It's fairly high. It's something like 70%, 80% of the rammings are of sailboats less than 45 feet long and with a spade rudder.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. So, can we talk for a second about this particular pod, this group of Iberian orca, because as you said, it's what, about 40 or less than 40 individuals?

And what's the social structure of an orca pod? Because I think I've been reading that. Is there a matriarch, or how are they ordered?

ROSE: Yes. Yes, they're matriarchal. Here's the fascinating part. They have culture, and the culture that they have, each population has a different culture.

It goes down to the level of social structure, so not all orcas are alike. The most common social structure is a matriarch with all of her offspring, including her adult sons, live with her for her entire life. Then when she dies, the sons often die too. Although if they have sisters, they'll live with their sisters.

They don't seem to have status in the larger population without a female to be attached to. And that female is always going to be a relative. So it's his mother for all of her life. And then his sister, if he has one, his aunt, if he doesn't have a sister, seriously, that level of family bonding.

And then seriously, if he has no female to live with, he tends to die soon after that, because he just can't function in the society. There's no way for him to gain an in, if you will, without a female to be attached to. And it's going to be a relative. So that's their social structure. So when you see an adult male with a bunch of other smaller whales or females and all of that, it's the son, the eldest son of the female and all of his siblings.

It's not a harem male with a bunch of females or anything like that. And so these guys live like that. This particular population does live that way. And again, there's fewer than 40 of them. So they're critically endangered, and they are now having a baby boom because food is plentiful. And so there's lots of juveniles and now adolescents to play this game.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I'm seeing a pattern here amongst highly intelligent mammals, being matriarchal societies with orca and elephants. Wish I could add humans in there.

ROSE: I wish. So I would, and of course some populations of humans are matriarchal. Yeah. So again, remember this is cultural. Elephants don't have culture as much.

They do, but not as much. They all seem to have the same social structure, no matter where they are. Orcas have different social structures depending on where they are. Some of them don't live with their mother for their whole life. They break off at some point and emigrate and do something else.

So this is just a fascinating species, quite frankly.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And there's been evidence for years and years that scientists have observed about just the extent of social learning, right? That goes on between orcas.

ROSE: They speak different languages. They speak different languages and that's all learning.

They learn how to speak, they call dialects, they're not actually, they're called dialects. They're not actually called different languages, because they all understand each other. But within this fewer than 40 population, there's several dialects. So the mother teaches her offspring how to talk.

And so they talk like their mom. And so eventually a population of, let's say, 150 to 200 orcas will speak, I don't know, 15 different dialects.

CHAKRABARTI: And for this particular pod I think has the matriarch been given a name and is she the one who first started playing with the rudders?

ROSE: There are multiple.

Multiple matriarchs in this population. Because it's the matriarch and all of her offspring. So she's only going to have 5,6, 7 offspring and there's about 40 whales. So there's at least 8 matriarchs or so. I can't remember exactly how many, I got a chart of this population, but there's 6 to 8 matriarchs.

So there's six to eight matriarchal groups, and that's where you get the adult females participating in this ramming behavior. It's the moms watching their kids and sometimes playing with them, because don't moms sometimes join in the silly game on the playground just to make the kid happy. So sometimes the moms do ram the boats, but it's very rare.

They're there to watch their kids.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. So we don't exactly know if it was like one orca that started this behavior. It could have just been like a bunch of kids getting together.

ROSE: The first time it happened back in 2020, it seemed to be three animals, and they were all juveniles. And their mother was just observing.

She wasn't participating. And it spread very quickly. That's what fads do, because they usually don't last very long, and they spread very quickly. And so it's now 15, 16 animals that are involved. And again, that's like half the population. That's pretty crazy.

CHAKRABARTI: It's so delightful to have this conversation with you, Naomi, because in a sense, every time we talk about the health of the oceans and the creatures that live in it, it's bad news these days, but it is ... heartening to hear that because these orca now have, they don't have to work so hard to eat, they've got free time to actually play and we're in their living room.

ROSE: (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: We're in their playground. We're in their living room. This is the point. We're in their home.

ROSE: And I don't want to just burst that lovely bubble you blew up, but the problem is no, the problem is, of course, that this particular game is dangerous. Wearing a salmon on your head. Hilarious. Nobody cares. Nobody cares, including the whales. It's just a game, but here the mariners care. Lucie and her dad cared. This is scary and it's damaging property, which some people do not like.

And so this is a situation where the kids are playing a game. That's teenagers have bad judgment. Yeah, it's not just dangerous because the mariners are doing bad things. They're dropping firecrackers on them. They're shooting flares at them. They poured a bunch of gasoline on one group. It's dangerous for the whales because of the retribution the mariners are taking.

But it's also dangerous, of course, for people. And all we need to turn it into a really ugly scene is for somebody to get hurt. Nobody's been hurt. Nobody's been hurt at all, not even an injury. But somebody does, somebody drowns. We're in big trouble for those whales. And again, critically endangered. We do not need them to be in trouble.

We want them to stay out of trouble. And yes, it's heartening to know they can play games and that they're just having fun, but it's at these mariners' expense and they're not taking it very well. We're really pushing the narrative. The message that you're a guest in their home and they've chosen to use you as a plaything and you just have to accept that it's the cost of doing business to sail through this area.

You can imagine that's not really landing very well.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Naomi, I wanted to also just ask you a little bit more about the evidence of the intelligence of these orca. I understand that, first of all, the mass of an orca's brain is what, five times the mass of a human brain?

ROSE: Of course, they're a lot bigger than us too.

The key parameter is what's the ratio of their brain size to their body size. And it's very close to ours. It's exactly the same as when we were homo habilis, when we were evolving way back in the day, and they also, a lot of their body is fat, right? They have this big layer of blubber, this thick layer of blubber to keep them warm in the cold ocean.

And if you take that fat away, it's even a more, it's even a larger ratio closer to ours. And so some of your brain has to go to just keeping your body running, and that's part of what their brain goes to. And then the rest of it is, what do you do with it? You develop sociality.

You become dependent on others to survive in your habitat. And then you get even smarter, right? Because you need to remember things. So you have to develop a long memory. For example, if X did this to you way back, 5 months ago, you have to remember that, because maybe you want to do something reciprocal later, because it was a good thing, or maybe you don't want to do something good for them later, because it was a bad thing.

So you have to remember the members of your social group. You have to remember what they did to you, fairly long ago, so that you can continue relationships with them that are logical. And basically all of these things are being, are evolving in a very complex habitat where you have to remember where your food is.

You have to remember how to hunt it. You have to cooperate to hunt it. Think of wolves. Think of elephants who have very long memories. That's one of the myths about elephants, but it's also pretty true. And the females, this is a matriarchal society, orcas. And so are elephants, the females are the ones with the archive of memories that take you back to the good water holes, or take you back to the good fishing grounds. And so they have value to the population beyond, what you might expect. And one of the things that orcas do, that even elephants don't do, and only humans and a couple of other species do it.

Is they go through menopause. You have very little value as an individual of any species whatsoever. Birds, amoeba, doesn't matter. If you don't reproduce, you have no biological value. And so you do reproduce right up until you die. In a handful of cases, females have value beyond their reproductive life, in the case of orcas.

And in the case of humans, it's this archive of knowledge. It's one of the reasons matriarchal societies do evolve in some populations of humans, because women will remember these things and they are the hunter gatherers in primitive society, and they are the child bearers. And so their long memories can have enormous value for the population.

And in the case of workers, that's exactly what they do have. Males who have living mothers do much better in terms of reproduction, they have a lot of kids, than males who don't have living mothers and are living with their sister or are living alone in the societies that do that. So I try to explain to folks who don't know this, orcas are scary smart. They're scary smart. They think, they plan. They anticipate, they have long memories. They can, and this is a very sophisticated cognitive ability. They can anticipate what will happen if they do A or B?

Really. That's scary smart.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

ROSE: One of the reasons we think, one of the one of the reasons we think that this is a bunch of teenagers playing a stupid game is because it's dangerous and it's high risk behavior.

And who does that in humans, teenagers? Who have no judgment or poor judgment? And they are the same. Their judgment is poor. That's why the females are there. The adult females, they're trying to keep an eye on the kids, so they don't do something too stupid.

CHAKRABARTI: But that implies Naomi, that there's a similar kind of, or at least an analogous kind of brain development in orcas as there is in humans, right?

ROSE: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: Cause like our cerebral cortex.

ROSE: It is so complex.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, our cerebral cortex, though, once we hopefully reach our twenties or thirties, develop so that we're supposed to have better judgment in humans, it's the same thing in orca?

ROSE: And the same things in orcas. And they have very complex convolutions in their brain matter, which is very similar to ours.

If you look at an orca brain and you look at a human brain, you can see the similarities. Versus say, looking at a cat brain, I love cats, but they're pretty limited in their cognitive abilities. Very good cats, but they're not good humans. And they're not good dogs. And they're not good orcas. It's one of the things that people have to understand.

We're not orcas on land and they are not humans in the water, but they have similar cognitive abilities, and it is the planning and the anticipation and the thinking about the future aspect of their intelligence that makes them scary. It is one of the reasons they're the top predator in the ocean.

They hunt everything from small schooling fish to other mammals, other whales. That's why they're called killer whales. They killed whales. And so it is cultural, again, what they eat is cultural. That's why these guys eat bluefin tuna. The Pacific Northwest orcas eat salmon, and the Antarctic whales eat other mammals.

It's what you're taught as a kid. And so what's going on here. I don't like people being too anthropomorphic, right? Anthropomorphism is probably never a good idea, but in this case, their cognitive abilities have so many similarities to ours. The fact that they're playing a game and it's mostly kids and adolescents, teenagers, and they're showing bad judgment and all of those things.

It's fair to say they are that sophisticated.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. This is our chance to widen the scope of this conversation a little bit because obviously one of the reasons why, the reason why we care is because there's so many humans transiting through that area, that there's just a lot of opportunity for that pod to play those games.

But, the human impact, not just on the Straits of Gibraltar, but around the world on the oceans, I want to talk with you a little bit about that specifically vis-a-vis the orca. But before we do that, we spoke with Alex Zerbini, who's a senior scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Climate Action, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies at the University of Washington, and Naomi, as he also served with you on the committee that produced the report on the Iberian orca behavior, and we talked to him more broadly about what other risks human intervention or human actions on the seas pose for marine mammals?

ALEX ZERBINI: The greatest threat that we have today to cetaceans is what we call bycatch, which is the incidental interactions of cetaceans with fishing operations. Bycatch could be a whale gets entangled in a rope. Bycatch could be a dolphin gets trapped in a net and they often die because of that.

So the more nets we put in the water, the greater the chances of killing a whale or killing a dolphin.

CHAKRABARTI: Zerbini says pollution and population expansion, human population expansion, are additional threats to large marine mammal habitat. And he says there are a number of ways that human waste and garbage hinders cetacean health.

ZERBINI: As populations, human population grows, we move into coastal waters because everybody wants to live by the beach, and that increases the amount of chemicals, the amount of trash that goes into the ocean, and that is also causing issues to the animals. Chemical pollution is known as an important source of negative impact to whales.

It affects their reproduction, it affects their health. They become more exposed to diseases, because their immune systems are not working as well as they were before. Trash in the ocean is a really important source of mortality today for these animals. Whales often eat floating objects on the water, plastics, and eventually they're going to die as a consequence of that.

CHAKRABARTI: And although Zerbini acknowledges that some whale populations have bounced back after years of conservation efforts, there are still other groups that remain at risk due to human beings. And Zerbini says the North Atlantic right whale is a perfect example.

ZERBINI: I think the North Atlantic right whale, which is a species that was heavily hunted is a great example of how the post whaling human threats are potentially affecting whales, right? Whales are declining. The North Atlantic right whale is declining. There is a great probability or a large probability that it's going to go extinct if we don't stop the threats. And the main threats are entanglements in fishing gear and ship strikes.

CHAKRABARTI: So there's much work left to be done to preserve magnificent and sophisticated marine mammals.

And not just the marine mammals, of course, but many, or all of the creatures that live in the sea. But getting back to these Iberian orcas, when it comes to addressing the issue of the teenage orcas playing with ships rudders? Zerbini says there's room for scientists to explore different ideas for deterrence.

ZERBINI: Examples of these mitigation measures are something, for example, we call oikomi pipes, which is essentially a void tube that goes from your boat into the water, and then you hit that tube, and it causes and makes noise in the water, and that keeps the animals away from the boat. There is also evidence, for example, that orcas don't like to go through lines on the water, vertical lines.

So people will be testing if an interaction occurs if you drop lines alongside the boat, whether the orcas are going to try to reach the rudder or not, there is the idea of making the rudder, the surface of the rudder rough versus smooth and depending on how rough that is, the orcas might not want to touch it because it's no longer fun to touch it. It could cause abrasion to the skin.

CHAKRABARTI: Alex Zerbini, senior scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Climate Action, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies at the University of Washington. Now, Naomi, we only have a couple of minutes left here, and I'm wondering if you could just share your thoughts with what the future of, since we've been talking about orcas specifically, are around the world and especially keeping in mind that this particular pod that you've been explaining to us, you keep saying they're critically endangered.

So what's the outlook like?

ROSE: I think the outlook for the Iberian orcas is actually fairly good. If Mariners in the area can come to see this game. And the damage it's doing to their vessels, as I put it, the cost of doing business, if you want to sail through that area, there are things you can do, as Alex explained, that might minimize your risk of an interaction and certainly minimize your risk for damage.

But it's a risk if you sail through this area, just accept that and understand you are in their home. This is where they have to live. You do not have to live on the ocean. We are terrestrial creatures. We don't belong there. We've made it a place we go, but we should be respectful. I hope some of the mariners will take that message on board.

Around the world, we have to start thinking about everything we do as individuals has an impact down the road. It actually does matter what we do as individuals. I know a lot of people think, ah, if I throw this piece of plastic on the ground, it doesn't matter. It does. And that's the only way we're going to fix this problem.

If enough people doesn't have to be every individual of the 8 million plus people who are on the planet, but it has to be a significant proportion of those people have to start caring about their individual actions, what they eat, what they do with their recycling, what they do with their ehicles, what they do with their travel, what they do with their homes.

I've got solar panels. I've got an electric car. I'm trying. And everybody just has to try. Because if they don't, we won't have a home.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I'll leave us with this last thought that years ago I was sea kayaking in the Northern Puget Sound and a pod of orca just decided to come up right next to us and surface like right next to our kayak.

The six-foot-long dorsal fin coming out of the water and there was like a little calf as well. It is an absolutely life changing experience. And in order to have more of those kinds of close and gentle experiences, we need to do all we can to protect marine environments.