After receiving quite positive feedback from both mariners and marine biologists I have created a Spanish-language version of the Orca Zone checklists and protocols, which can be downloaded here. Also, some minor corrections were incorporated into the English-language version, which is also available for downloading here. Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.
Tras recibir comentarios muy positivos de navegantes y biólogos marinos, he creado una versión en español de las listas de verificación y protocolos de Orca Zone, que puede descargarse aquí. Además, se incorporaron algunas correcciones menores a la versión en inglés, que también está disponible para descargar aquí. Cualquier comentario o sugerencia de mejora es bienvenida.
As an inspiration and direct result from the discussions at the February Orca Symposium in Tarifa Spain, I have developed a set of checklists and practical protocols, which will be helpful to mariners intending to pass through orcas zones and orca attack hotspots. The 19-page document can be downloaded here. Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.
Here is the revised PDF version of the paper, which was presented at ITDRR 2024, the 9th IFIP WG5.15 Conference on Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction, held at Krems, Austria from Oct 14, 2024 to Oct 16, 2024.
Citation: Scholl, Hans J. (2024, Oct 14-16), “The Iberian Orca Interaction Crisis: Disentangling Wild Marine and Human Lives—A Call for Managed Co-existence” Paper presented at the 9th IFIP WG5.15 Conference on Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction, held at Krems, Austria. https://faculty.waschington.edu/jscholl/itdrr2024/Scholl_2024b.pdf
Orca-related research appears to attract an increasing number of academic disciplines beyond marine biology, wildlife behavioral studies, and conservation. Most empirical research in the subject area involves all kind of advanced sensory, measuring, observational, and information technologies. Other scholars here come from as distant fields as linguistics, genetics, and history among others. My own participation, which emphasizes the perspectives of emergency management and information management, is only another case in point. Learning from these different academic perspectives is fascinating to me.
For showing accepted posters (see below) the organizers chose a historical spot (a building, which had served for a long time as a Christian Church once converted from an Islamic Mosque, which in turn was built on a large Roman foundation adjacent to a Medieval Fortress).
José Antonio Sanz Perea, Tarifa’s Mayor, welcoming the Symposium participants Entrance to the “Iglesia Santa Maria” hosting the poster exhibitionInside the former churchSailors’ Telegram self-help groups have helped disentangle sailors and orcasScale model of an orca outside the symposium venuePanel discussion on human-orca interaction on February 20, 2025
For four years, encounters between orcas and recreational sailors have not been very happy ones (for the recreational sailors) in the Strait of Gibraltar and around the Atlantic shores of the Iberian peninsula. So far, no human lives have been lost; however, a total of six sailboats were sunk as a result of orcas attacking and damaging the rudders of sailboats. Over 500 such encounters have been reported since, and some five dozen sailboats have been badly damaged.
In response to these incidents, recreational sailboaters have organized a self-help group (orcas.pt) that provides warnings, location data of sightings and incidents, along with advice and guidelines to sailboat skippers and crews. At the Orca Symposium to be held in mid-February of 2025 in Tarifa, Spain, the poster below will be presented, which calls for an integrated and collaborative approach to creating and maintaining situational awareness and a common operating picture that helps prevent potential human-orca interaction.
To achieve this, the information available from all stakeholders, that is, marine biologists, marine conservationists, fishermen, whale watchers, sailboaters, Coast Guard, Spanish, Portuguese, and Moroccan government agencies, needs to be collected and integrated in near-real time.
So far, it is not clear what initially caused and still motivates the orcas’ behavior; nor is it clear whether or not this pattern of behavior will cede any time soon. The poster below (to be shown at the February symposium) details some aspects of the problem from the recreational sailors’ self-help perspective.
