From the point of view of the Alaska Dispatch News, it’s clear who the victims are in this story: fishermen. And the perps are readily identified, too: Orcas, or killer whales. Animal lovers, not to mention vegetarians, might well see these labels flipped. It depends on who, according to you, gets to eat the fish in the ocean.
It’s also a story of how crime — if it’s really a crime — does pay. The News spoke to several fishermen about what’s going on.Orcas have been following the boats of longline fishermen in the Bering Sea off Alaska and making off with the halibut and black cod, or sablefish, caught by demersal longlines deployed on the ocean floor. Attached to each longline are shorter lines, called “snoods,” with baited hooks. (Floating elagic longlines that catch tuna and other surface fish have been criticized by Greenpeace.)
On the shallow Bering Sea continental shelf, where there’s plenty of halibut and black cod, and lots of orcas, things are especially intense.
Fisherman Jeff Kauffman tells the News the orcas are targeting specific boats, and captain of the Oracle Robert Hanson, who shot the video above, knows how that feels. In a letter he wrote to the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council in May 2017, he spoke of an April trip during which his boat was being “harassed non-stop” by killer whales. He says his crew lost 12,000 pounds of sellable halibut to the hungry Orcinus orcas, and wasted 4,000 gallons of fuel trying to get away from them. Another time, at the edge of the legal fishing area near the Russian border, 50 orcas showed up, and after…
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