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Twitter Just Really Thinks the Orcas and J.K. Rowling’s Yacht Should Meet

As you’ve no doubt heard, there is currently a war between orcas and boats and we are all strongly team orcas. It seems as if the orcas have had enough of boats and their nonsense and are banning together to attack them while also teaching their young to do the same. As always, good for her (the orcas). The orcas don’t show any signs of slowing down and we all have suggestions of who they can target next—specifically, one TERF Who Shall Not Be Named who happens to own a $19.2 million yacht.

Learning that J.K. Rowling—a woman who was once at the top of her game and then has just made it her goal to spread hate and bigotry has left many fans angry about the Harry Potter series, her other work, and just seeing her name in general—has a yacht that costs more money than I’ll ever see in my lifetime is a humbling experience. Mainly because why does a boat cost that much?

No matter the answer, this is great information for one specific group of individuals: The orcas.

https://t.co/LlTknJDNr0 pic.twitter.com/smvpNF9CIw — Jordan Maison (@JordanMaison) June 19, 2023

Think of the poetry of it. Rowling spending all her money on a yacht and watching it sink like the sinking ship of her legacy she ruined just because she wanted to fill the world with hate. That’s more poetic than naming a werewolf Lupin . (Also no, I don’t care about the community note attached to that tweet above, let me have the fantasy.)

I hope the orcas take out all J.K. Rowling’s boats

Look, I don’t want to wish ill will on people. That’s not nice. However , if the orcas decided that they wanted to support trans rights, then I’m very happy to support the orcas in their quest to destroy the property of something that fantasy-loving queer and trans communities essentially helped buy for Rowling. If the piles of money she’s crying into is being used for something like a yacht in the water of the orcas, it’s their right to do with it as they will.

It has led to Twitter egging the orcas on. Man, orca Twitter is the best.

they have now https://t.co/XacLQIep02 pic.twitter.com/WxTgvnbOq6 — Dr. Doug ???? (@RaptorBreath) June 19, 2023

Before anyone starts clutching their pearls and accusing us of trying to Avada Kedavra Rowling, no one said we want her on the yacht, we just want the orcas to take it as their own watery possession (while it’s empty, of course).

This yacht was also previously owned by Johnny Depp and sold to Rowling in 2015 for $27 million dollars . Happy to watch an orca take this ship as their own. I don’t know who the “businessman” is that Twitter says now owns it but clearly, this is a cursed yacht. Personally, I think that the orcas could make better use of it than Rowling or Depp could.

(featured image: Paramount Pictures)

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• The Internet

The Internet Agrees: Killer Orcas Should Probably Attack JK Rowling’s Yacht

By Henry Giardina

June 20, 2023

If you’ve been awake and alive for the past few weeks, news of killer orcas ramming and sinking boats on the Iberian Peninsula has probably graced your feed, and you’ve probably thought to yourself, “wow, nature is healing.”

Well, you’re right: as with the murder hornet debacle of 2021, sometimes the nature world feels the need to partake in its own sh*tposting, often to the detriment of us humans having a fun, nice summer. And that’s all fine and great! We’re firmly on the side of the killer whales, even if some Atlantic writer finds it silly.

But you know what would really get us on their side? If they started attacking TERF author JK Rowling’s $19 million yacht.

Have you guys seen JK Rowling's $19.2M yacht? And by "you guys" I mean orcas. pic.twitter.com/PLwbu29w1t — Blame Tag 🏷️ (@BlameTag) June 19, 2023

Rowling—who, as a reminder, lives in a literal castle —has continued to pick her battles poorly this year. Rebranding herself as a defender of cis women’s rights (lol) she recently set up a trans-exclusionary therapy service and took Johns Hopkins University’s new set of LGBTQ+ care guidelines to task for…being gender-inclusive. She continues to paint herself as the victim, despite, again, living in a castle and owning a 20 million dollar yacht.

Related JK Rowling Denies That TERFs are Nazis Despite Overwhelming Nazi Support TERF logic: it’s not built on the strongest foundations.

So yes, I think it’s time to bring in the orcas, don’t you?

Manifesting the orcas targeting this one https://t.co/5pMh4Iddkf — Enjolras (@revepourlavenir) June 20, 2023

Here’s how Orcas can show support to the trans community in this pride month: https://t.co/hXdGre1uu1 — rylan, you should try to get some sun. ☀️ (@gaviaoarmeiro) June 20, 2023

Someone in the comments said "surf and TERF" and I can't lie, I giggled. https://t.co/XnZ7PwiV7r — Punch Your Local Nazi/Transphobe/Racist/etc (@SunshineSkitten) June 20, 2023

Hold on…what’s that? We’re getting word that the yacht was previously owned by alleged abuser Johnny Depp? Oh yeah, that thing needs to go down, stat.

did you know this supposedly used to belong to Johnny Depp as well https://t.co/w6K929pKBT — jacob (@smithtennant04) June 20, 2023

imagine claiming to be a feminist and then buying J*hnny D*pp's boat so he can pay his divorce fees lmfao https://t.co/fSrOyNeKh0 — Grace (@_graceU) June 20, 2023

Honestly, an orca attack on this boat would make our day.

i am calling upon orcas to please do the funniest thing ever https://t.co/MHUw9qiqon — pots and pan (@hotniceandcool) June 20, 2023

2023, release date tentative, The Psycho Who Wrote Harry Potter and the Pod of Unusually Angry Whales https://t.co/UubOBtezZN — sentient butter roll (@inviolablevoice) June 20, 2023

Given her track record, I wouldn't put it past her to have an orca net and SeaWorld on speed dial https://t.co/ZlhCMtmrwq — Brittnay Matthews, Mercenary Cheerleader (@dorothyjanetork) June 20, 2023

Here’s hoping.

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Why a yacht docked in Halifax is getting extra attention

Yachts along the Halifax Waterfront often garner attention, but one currently docked has people doing a double take.

The Samsara, which is docked near Bishop's Landing, is reportedly owned by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

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People were stopping by Sunday to get a look at the yacht and see if anybody was on board. Crew members could be seen at times.

According to the website ' SuperYachtFan ', the Samsara was sold to Rowling in 2023 and is valued at $150 million US.

CTV News has reached out to Rowling's PR team for more information.

For more Nova Scotia news visit our  dedicated provincial page .

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'Harry Potter' author JK Rowling's yacht visits US Southern states

T he mega yacht reportedly owned by "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling recently made a few stops at U.S. ports, causing local buzz along the way.

The writer's yacht, a vessel called the Samsara, was first spotted earlier this month off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida , according to Fits News. It then docked in Savannah, Georgia, until June 8, before making its way up the coast to Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.  

It is unclear whether Rowling was onboard the super yacht during its travels to the Southern states. FOX Business has reached out to the author's publicist for further details.

According to Superyachtfan.com, the Samara is 290 feet long and was built in 2015 by Oceanco. The vessel has seven cabins for holding up to 14 guests, along with another 13 cabins for housing up to 27 crew members.

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The luxury boat is worth an estimated $150 million and costs between $10 million and $15 million to operate annually, according to the site. 

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For those wishing to take it for a spin, the Samara is available for charter at YachtCharterFleet.com for around $1,179,000 per week. The site states that the yacht has a movie theater, swimming pool, elevator, beach club, gym and helicopter hangar.

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Samsara also has an array of toys for guests to choose from, including Jet Skis, a Flyboard, a Kite Surfer, a seabob, wakeboards, kayaks and WindSurfers.

Rowling is the world's wealthiest author , with an estimated net worth of around $1 billion, according to a recent report by The Sun. However, she was famously booted from the Forbes billionaire list in 2012 after her charitable giving led to her net worth falling below that mark.

Rowling began writing the "Harry Potter" book series in the 1990s as a struggling single mother. Since then, she has sold more than 600 million copies globally, and the eight films based on the series have raked in more than $7.7 billion, according to IMBD.

Original article source: 'Harry Potter' author JK Rowling's yacht visits US Southern states

Why are killer whales going ‘Moby-Dick’ on yachts lately? Experts doubt it’s revenge

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The attacks started suddenly and inexplicably in the spring of 2020 — pods of endangered killer whales began ramming yachts and fishing boats in European waters, pushing some off course and imperiling others.

Since then, there have been more than 500 reports of orca encounters off the Iberian Peninsula, the most recent occurring Thursday when a trio of whales rubbed against and bumped a racing sloop in the Strait of Gibraltar.

In most cases, the financial and structural damage has ranged from minimal to moderate: Boats have been spun and pushed, and rudders have been smashed and destroyed. Three vessels have been so badly mauled, they’ve sunk.

As the encounters continue, shaky video captured by thrilled and fearful seafarers has ignited a global internet sensation, while experts have struggled to explain the behavior and its timing. The seemingly militant whales have also won over a legion of adoring fans — many transfixed by the notion that the mammals are targeting rich people and exacting revenge for all the wrongs humanity has waged on their species and their ocean home.

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Others wonder if the unusually large pods of multi-ton cetaceans now appearing off the coasts of San Francisco , Monterey and Nantucket, Mass., may soon follow suit.

Despite such rampant speculation on social media, most killer whale scientists have offered a very different interpretation. The Moby-Dick “revenge” narrative for the behavior is highly unlikely, they say.

“That just doesn’t sit right with me,” said Deborah Giles, an orca researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle and director of Wild Orca, a Washington-based conservation research organization.

She noted that despite the long history of orcas being hunted by whalers — and more recently marine parks — these top ocean predators have typically demonstrated a lack of aggression toward humans. There are no verified instances of orcas killing humans in the wild. The only deaths have occurred in marine parks and aquariums, where animals taken from the wild and forced to perform for humans in small tanks have attacked their trainers.

“So, I just don’t really see it as an agonistic activity; I just don’t see it going down like that,” said Giles, who has studied killer whales in the Pacific Ocean, Puget Sound and the Salish Sea for nearly 20 years.

Instead, she thinks the animals are engaging with boats because the vessels are “either making an interesting vibration or sound, or maybe it’s the way the water moves past the keels that is intriguing to these animals.”

The scientific literature is rife with anecdotes and research showing high cognition, playfulness and sociality in the species known as Orcinus orca — and examples of what appear to be the cultural transmission of new behaviors, either via teaching or observation.

In 1987, a female orca in the Pacific waters off North America was spotted sporting a dead salmon on her head. Within weeks, individuals in two other pods also began wearing fish hats. The trend lasted a few months and fizzled out within a year.

In South Africa, the killing of white sharks appears to be growing in popularity among a resident group of killer whales in the waters near Cape Town; Giles has watched a local trend of “phocoenacide” — porpoise killing — grow among a group of whales off the San Juan Islands.

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In both cases, the behavior does not appear to be for the purpose of feeding, Giles said. The orcas do not eat the dead animals. For instance, in the case of the porpoises, the killer whales played with them — bandying them about, sometimes surfing with them, other times carrying them on the orcas’ pectoral fins — until the porpoises drowned, at which point they were abandoned, she said.

“Fads” are not unique to orcas. Other animals, including primates and other cetaceans, have also been observed to adopt new behaviors, which then spread through a social group.

Susan Perry, a biological anthropologist at UCLA, has studied a population of capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica, where she has observed and demonstrated the cultural transmission of novel behaviors, including “eye poking” — in which one monkey slips its finger “knuckle deep” between the eyelid and the bottom of another monkey’s eyeball.

But the idea that the whales’ behavior is a response to trauma has gripped many — including the researchers who most closely study this population and first documented the behavior.

In a paper published last year , a team of Portuguese and Spanish researchers suggested the behavior seen in the Strait of Gibraltar orcas could have been triggered by a variety of causes, including trauma.

Alfredo López Fernandez, a killer whale researcher with GT Orca Atlántica, a Portuguese conservation research organization, said it is impossible to know how it started, or which whale or whales may have initially instigated the attacks.

He listed several adult females as the possible original perpetrators — which then taught or showed others how to participate.

There is White Gladis, which seems to be present in most of the attacks; Gladis Negra, which was observed to have injuries in 2020, possibly from a ship strike; and Gray Gladis, which in 2018 witnessed another whale get trapped in fishing gear.

Gladis is a name given to all orcas in the pod that interact with boats; it comes from Orca gladiator, an early nickname given to these boat-jouncing killer whales.

“All of this has to make us reflect on the fact that human activities, even in an indirect way, are the origin of this behavior,” he said.

For Cal Currier’s part, he thinks the whales are entertaining themselves.

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On June 8, as the 17-year-old Palo Alto High School senior sailed through the strait with his father, James, 55, and brother, West, 19, their 30-foot sailboat was accosted and spun in circles.

The rudder was battered, and the trio had to be towed to shore in Spain. “They were playing,” Currier said.

He said that when they pulled in, they were told roughly 30 other boats were ahead of them in line for repairs; half were damaged by the killer whales. He said there were no bite marks on the rudder, and he did not sense aggression from the whales.

For Giles, the Washington killer whale researcher, her biggest concern is that the longer the whales continue this behavior, the more likely it is they’ll get injured or suffer retribution at the hands of humans.

She’s hoping authorities in the region will consider non-traumatic hazing techniques — such as instructing boats to play or make sounds that irritate the whales — to get them to stop. She said studies have shown orcas don’t like the calls of pilot whales and will generally swim away if they hear them. Loud banging sounds, such as hitting a large, metal oikomi pipe underwater, can also be effective.

“Anything that might irritate them, make them lose their interest or swim away,” Giles said.

Currier said he wasn’t too rattled by the whole experience — unlike his dad and brother, who were “scared for their lives.”

The trio have since sold the boat and intend to spend the rest of the vacation on dry land.

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Orcas sank three boats off the coast of Portugal, but don't call them 'killer' just yet

Three recent incidents of orcas seemingly attacking and sinking boats off the southwestern tip of Europe are drawing intense scrutiny over whether the animals deliberately swarmed the vessels and if they are learning the aggressive behavior from one another.

Encounters between orcas, or killer whales, and boats have been increasing since 2020, though no human injuries or deaths have been reported. In most cases, the whales have not sunk the boats.

The string of incidents since 2020 prompted one scientist in Portugal to say the attacks may indicate that the whales are intending to cause damage to sailing vessels. Others, however, are more skeptical, saying that while the behavior may be coordinated, it’s not necessarily coordinated aggression.

“I think it gets taken as aggression because it’s causing damage, but I don’t think we can say that the motivation is aggressive necessarily,” said Monika Wieland Shields, director of the Orca Behavior Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington state.

At least 15 interactions between orcas and boats off the Iberian coast were reported in 2020, according to a study published last June in the journal Marine Mammal Science .

In November 2020, Portugal’s National Maritime Authority issued a statement alerting sailors about “curious behavior” among juvenile killer whales. The statement said the whales may be attracted to rudders and propellers and may try to approach boats.

The subsequent sinkings have caused more alarm.

The most recent encounter occurred on May 4 off the coast of Spain. Three orcas struck the rudder and side of a sailing yacht, causing it to eventually sink, as was reported earlier this month in a German publication called Yacht .

One theory put forward by Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, suggested that the aggression started from a female orca that was perhaps struck by a boat — a traumatic experience that caused her to start ramming sailing vessels. López Fernandez, who co-authored the June 2022 study published in Marine Mammal Science, told Live Science that other orcas may have then picked up that behavior through social learning, which whales have been known to exhibit.

But Shields said orcas have not historically been known to be aggressive toward humans, even when they were being hunted and placed in captivity.

“They’ve certainly had reason to engage in that kind of behavior,” she said. “There are places where they are shot at by fishermen, they’ve watched family members be taken from their groups into captivity in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And if something was going to motivate direct aggression, I would think something like that would have done it.”

Shields added that there are no clear instances of killer whales exhibiting what could be thought of as revenge behavior against humans.

She said the recent attacks on boats are likely more consistent with what’s known as “fad” behavior, which describes novel but temporary conduct from one whale that can be mimicked by others.

“It’s kind of a new behavior or game that one whale seems to come up with, and it seems to spread throughout the population — sometimes for a matter of weeks or months, or in some cases years — but then in a lot of cases it just goes away,” she said.

In the Pacific Northwest, for instance, Shields and her colleagues have observed fad behavior among Southern Resident killer whales who started carrying dead salmon around on their heads for a time before the behavior suddenly stopped.

Shields said the behavior of orcas off the Iberian coast may also be temporary.

“This feels like the same type of thing, where one whale played with a rudder and said: ‘Hey, this is a fun game. Do you want to try it?’ And it’s the current fad for that population of orcas,” she said.

While Shields did not dismiss the trauma response theory out of hand, she said it would be difficult to confirm without more direct evidence.

“We know their brains are wired to have really complex emotions, and so I think they could be capable of something like anger or revenge,” she said. “But again, it’s just not something that we’ve seen any examples of, and we’ve given them plenty of opportunities throughout the world to want to take revenge on us for various things. And they just choose not to.”

Denise Chow is a science and space reporter for NBC News.