Orcas don't care what you think of them. They never have. But for centuries we've insisted on projecting our guilt, our terror, and our fantasies onto those black-and-white bodies cutting through the dark ocean. The story of the killer whale isn't really about the killer whale at all — it's about us. And as someone who's spent years studying how humans interpret what we observe in the cosmos, I find the parallel irresistible.
I spend most of my days looking up. Astronomy trained me to search for meaning in faint light arriving from billions of years away. But sometimes the most revealing thing isn't what you see — it's how you see it. That's the lesson of the orca, distilled beautifully by historian Jason Colby in a recent essay for Aeon. His argument hit me like cold Atlantic spray: killer whales have served as a kind of Rorschach test for humanity's conflicted attitudes toward the sea. Whatever era you live in, whatever cultural tide is rising, the orca becomes your canvas.
Monsters of Our Own Making
Let's rewind. Not so long ago, orcas were nightmares with fins. The US Navy's diving manual once described killer whales as "ruthless and ferocious," instructing divers to get out of the water if any showed up. One writer put it bluntly: "There is no treatment for being eaten by the orca except reincarnation." That line has the dark comedy of a truth nobody wanted to examine too closely.
Colby traces this terror across centuries. Whalers and sealers documented orcas attacking larger whales with coordinated precision — ripping at tongues, paralysing their prey with what seemed like deliberate psychological warfare. The former whaling captain Charles Scammon, writing in the early 1870s, called them "wolves of the ocean" and described them spreading "terror and death" through bays and lagoons. Keep in mind: Scammon himself helped drive California grey whales to near extinction. The irony is thick enough to walk on.
The predator was a monster. The humans doing far worse? Just businessmen.
Fear kept compounding. In 1911, the explorer Robert Scott watched orcas break through Antarctic ice, apparently chasing his expedition's journalist. He announced the species would "undoubtedly snap up anyone" unlucky enough to fall in. His report spread everywhere, mixing with exaggerated tales of orcas found with dozens of whole seals and porpoises in their stomachs. By 1937, when the Oakland Tribune ran a front-page headline screaming "Monster Cavorts Off Islands In Grim Chase To The Kill," the public image was set. Even though — and this is the detail that makes you rub your eyes — the supposed "attack" on a small surfboat described in that same article never actually happened. The orca dove under the boat and swam away. The facts didn't matter. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, even The New York Times ran the story.
By the 1950s, the US military was strafing orcas from planes off Iceland, killing hundreds to protect herring fisheries. The December 1953 cover of Stag magazine — a popular men's adventure publication circulating widely in the US armed forces — depicted a killer whale flinging two helpless men from a raft. The image was pure fiction. But that's the point: we didn't need evidence. We had feelings.
"Popular perceptions of killer whales have always told us more about people in a particular time and place than about the species itself."
The Accident That Changed Everything
The revolution started, as most revolutions do, by accident. In the summer of 1964, employees of the Vancouver Aquarium harpooned a killer whale calf. They wanted its body — a sculptor's reference for a foyer piece. The youngster didn't die. So they towed him to Vancouver, named him "Moby Doll," and watched in astonishment as the supposedly ferocious predator turned out to be... gentle. Quiet. Curious. He survived less than three months, but his docility rewired every assumption.
The next year, a Seattle aquarium owner named Ted Griffin purchased a large male orca accidentally trapped by Canadian fishermen. He named the whale "Namu" and did something scientists considered suicidal: he got in the water with him. Namu didn't eat Griffin. Instead, the whale let Griffin touch him, brush him, even ride him. The world's first orca shows opened on the Seattle waterfront. Millions read about it in National Geographic. Namu lived only a year in captivity, but his impact was enormous — the public was stunned by his gentleness, and aquariums worldwide scrambled to get their own orcas. Griffin supplied most of them, including SeaWorld's first "Shamu" (short for "She-Namu").
In just a few years, the "killer" became a cuddly icon. A sea panda.
Orca populations around the world are shaped by food culture, not just genetics. In the Pacific Northwest, "resident" populations eat primarily Chinook salmon, while "transient" (or Bigg's) killer whales eat exclusively other marine mammals. These two groups have different dialects and never socialise or interbreed in the wild. Think of it as neighbouring countries that share a border but speak different languages, eat different foods, and refuse to acknowledge each other's existence.
From Fear to Love — But at What Cost?
Here's a number that deserves a moment of silence: by 1970, some 30 million people had viewed captive orcas at aquariums and marine parks. Thirty million. Many weren't just spectators — they were researchers getting their first-ever access to live killer whales. Scientists studied their physiology, their diving mechanisms, their acoustic capacity. They came to know individual orcas with distinct personalities. Among them was Skana, a female captured in 1967, who profoundly influenced the scientist-activist Paul Spong and went on to inspire Greenpeace's anti-whaling campaign. Skana, Colby argues, was quite possibly the most influential cetacean in human history.
The real scientific breakthrough came from Michael Bigg, a marine mammologist at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Bigg developed a system to identify individual orcas by their dorsal fins and distinctive "saddle" patches — the markings behind their dorsal fins. He'd borrowed the idea from studies of African zebras and lions. Other researchers scoffed. They insisted the only way to identify marine mammals was to catch and brand them with dry ice or even lasers. Bigg's assistant, Graeme Ellis, remembered the scepticism at a meeting in Seattle: "I will never forget going down to a meeting with Mike." The dismissals were infuriating. But Bigg was patient. "The truth will come out in the long run," he'd say.
It did. Bigg's photo-identification system opened the door to understanding pod structures and population dynamics worldwide. In 1981, he presented his findings to the International Whaling Commission, helping convince the body to halt orca killings. The following year, the IWC passed a commercial whaling moratorium. Bigg died of cancer at 50 in October 1990, but his work lived on in every researcher who followed.
The Orca as Activist? Careful Now.
Fast forward to recent years. Orcas near Gibraltar have been disabling and sinking yachts — detaching rudders, puncturing hulls. Social media erupted with delight. The orcas were "eating the rich," "taking back the ocean." Eco-justice, narrated by dorsal fins. The Twitterverse turned them into anti-capitalist heroes overnight.
I understand the appeal. I really do. From my wheelchair here in Tirana, scrolling through those clips, there's something viscerally satisfying about watching a creature that owes nothing to anyone send a luxury yacht to the bottom. It tickles the same nerve as watching a small football club knock out a giant in the cup.
But we need to be honest with ourselves. We don't know why they're doing it.
Colby is clear-eyed about this: we can be reasonably sure the yacht strikes have nothing to do with SeaWorld, overfishing, or resentment of the rich. Like the 1970s depiction of whales as "buddhas of the sea," these stories of ecological reckoning are human stories told to and for other humans. They tell us nothing about the inner lives of orcas. The same species that seems to offer gifts to swimmers also abducts humpback calves. The same creature that shares food within its pod will torment prey — and even commit infanticide within its own species.
"Orcas continue to reflect our hopes and fears back to us. It is we ourselves, not orcas, who have changed."
What the Stars and the Sea Have in Common
I've been thinking about why this story grips me so deeply, and I think it's because it mirrors something I see in astronomy all the time. We look at the universe and we project. We name constellations after our myths. We call certain planets "habitable" because they remind us of home. We describe the cosmic microwave background as the "echo" of the Big Bang, as though the universe is whispering directly to us. It isn't. We just can't stop anthropomorphising the things that intimidate us.
Orcas evolved to navigate an aquatic and acoustic world that is, as Colby puts it, fundamentally alien to us. Their brains process information through echolocation, through a sensory experience we don't have a word for because we've never felt it. We are visitors to their world — brief, clumsy, loud visitors. And instead of sitting with that humbling truth, we dress them up as heroes or villains depending on what cultural costume happens to be trending.
That's the real cognitive dissonance, isn't it? Not that orcas can be both tender and violent — most predators are, humans very much included. The dissonance is that we keep expecting animals to fit neatly into our stories. Orcas don't have morality. They have behaviour, shaped by millions of years of evolution and transmitted through learned cultural traditions. The question, as Colby frames it, isn't whether we can truly know a species so unlike ourselves — it's whether we can better understand ourselves through them.
The New Horror, The Old Mirror
There's a new horror film coming in 2026 — Killer Whale — featuring a vindictive orca out for revenge against captivity. Its predecessor, the 1977 film Orca: The Killer Whale, flopped spectacularly because it was out of step with its time. Audiences in the late '70s had already been charmed by captive orcas. They'd accepted the "sea panda" narrative. A vengeful killer whale felt absurd.
Today? Today it fits perfectly. Public hostility to captivity, climate guilt, the yacht strikes — they've primed audiences to root for the orca. The killer whale, Colby observes, is making the transition from marine park mascot to nemesis of greedy, extractive capitalism. First a monster, then a mascot, now a revolutionary. The animal hasn't changed a single gene in the process.
And now, with AI-generated videos of orcas causing even greater destruction circulating online, Colby raises a question that genuinely keeps me awake: how will generative AI change what it means to be an orca — at least in the shifting human imagination? If we can fabricate footage of orcas destroying anything we want, does the real animal even matter anymore? Or does it become just another screen onto which we project our anxieties?
Never Give Up Looking
I founded FreeAstroScience because I believe science is the closest thing we have to a universal language — a way of seeing that transcends borders, bodies, abilities. I run this platform from a wheelchair, and I've learned something from my own body that applies just as well to orcas: the story people tell about you is rarely the whole story. It's rarely even close.
When people look at me, they see limitation. When they look at an orca, they see whatever the culture tells them to see. In both cases, the real thing — the living, breathing, complicated thing — gets lost behind the label.
So here's my invitation. Look again. Look harder. And be willing to be wrong.
The orca isn't your hero. It isn't your villain. It isn't your metaphor for capitalism's collapse or your proof of nature's benevolence. It's a 6,000-kilogram apex predator navigating a world of sound and pressure and cold salt water, living by rules we're only beginning to understand. That should be enough. That should be more than enough.
The universe doesn't owe us a story. Neither does the ocean. But when we stop demanding one and start simply observing — with rigour, with humility, with the patience of a Michael Bigg photographing dorsal fins — that's when we get closest to the truth. About orcas. About the stars. About ourselves.
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