Back in May, the stories from off the Iberian Peninsula of orcas taking apart the rudders and propellers of yachts — and, in a couple of incidents, ramming them — were both alarming and intriguing. There were many theories about why it was happening: A matriarch had been injured in an encounter with sailors and trained her male offspring to pursue the vessels; or she was teaching her young to hunt by focusing on objects — boats — that she knew couldn’t injure them; or it’s just that young orcas like to fool around and discovered that it’s simple enough to dismantle and disable sailboats; or, most ominously, it’s nature’s revenge for centuries of human depredation of the seas.

This week, video surfaced of a boat off Tarifa on the Strait of Gibraltar on Aug. 17 with something apparently explosive that caused puffs of white smoke off the stern as a couple of orcas did a dive around the vessel. Was it gunfire? Or an air gun? Or a firecracker? There had just been news of another fresh encounter between a yacht and orcas on Aug. 9, near the coast of Sesimbra, Portugal, further north on the Atlantic Coast. The whales undid the rudder and then rammed the boat. No humans were injured in either of the incidents, though no one knows if orcas were hurt off Tarifa.

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