What if those scary Roman dolphins... were actually orcas?

From Dall-E, an orca attacking a trireme

For the past four-ish years, a population of orcas near the Strait of Gibraltar has developed what seems to be the cetacean version of a TikTok trend, ramming nearly 700 boats just for the hell of it. This isn’t the first documented orca trend — in the late 80s, orcas in the Pacific Northwest briefly went through a phase of wearing dead salmon as hats. Orcas: they’re just like us (ie, they’ll do crazy, unflattering, dangerous shit for the lolz/likes).

Last month I spent some time in a boat off the coast of Spain, and… let’s just say that I wasn’t NOT worried about orcas. One morning the kids were FaceTiming with my partner’s mom, and we were talking about the upcoming boat trip and the chance of orca attack, and I joked, “My current prediction for the last thing I hear before I shuffle off this mortal coil is one of my kids saying, ‘ACTUALLY, technically an orca is a dolphin and not a whale.’” My 5-year-old son heard me saying this and piped up, “Actually, an orca is both the largest porpoise and a member of the toothed whale family!” So I shook my head and said, “Ok, my new prediction is that THAT is the last thing I’ll hear.”

Obviously, the orcas did not come for us, which I think was only a little disappointing for my marine life-loving children. But ever since then I’ve been thinking about orca boat attacks in the context of terrifying Roman dolphins:

And I’ve decided my new headcanon is that the reason Roman dolphins are so terrifying is that they’re actually orcas (which, I’ve been told, are technically a kind of dolphin).

Think about it. Orcas are legitimately frightening! I recently watched the David Attenborough Our Planet series on Netflix, and orcas are the bad guy in three separate storylines: one in which they toss a penguin around like it’s a motherfucking beach ball, one in which they snatch a baby seal from its parents, and one in which they ram a baby gray whale to death off the coast of Monterey. Which really gives new, terrifying context to this Lisa Frank classic:

Shortly after the moment captured in this image, the whale brutally murdered the dolphin and penguins and wore them all as hats.

Seriously: who does orcas’ PR? I think a lot about this passage from near the very beginning of Lindy West’s Shrill:

I had been erroneously led to believe that “veterinarian” was the grown-up term for “professional animal-petter.” I would later learn, crestfallen and appalled, that it’s more a term for “touching poo all the time featuring intermittent cat murder,” so the plan was abandoned. (The fact that ANY kid wants to be a veterinarian is bananas, by the way—whoever does veterinary medicine’s PR among preschool-aged children should be working in the fucking White House.)

The same applies to orcas, right? They’re essentially the serial killers of the sea. They engage in frankly diabolical hunting strategies like creating waves to push seals off icebergs and flipping sharks upside-down to induce tonic immobility. And yet… admit it, you’re still rooting for them. That Lisa Frank dolphin has creepy eyes, anyway. It deserves to be tortured and then eaten.

Obviously it’s not terribly likely that the Romans had contact with killer whales… although it’s not impossible, either. Clearly, orcas do hang out around Spain, and there have been some rare sightings further into the Mediterranean as well. So their presence in the sea that the Romans called “mare nostrum” is far from undocumented. And orcas are so much more frightening than dolphins that you could kind of understand why the Romans depicted them as razor-toothed demons with murder in their eyes.

Now, I can practically hear you objecting: would the orcas have left survivors to tell the tale via art? Yes, obviously they would. What’s the point in doing a TikTok trend if there’s no documentation? Orcas aren’t just apex predators: they’re also naturally gifted at social media. And they’re smart enough to not actually make themselves miserable on Twitter. #Goals.

did an orca make this meme?

Honestly, what’s our evidence that our intelligence is superior to theirs? “Civilization”? Come on. We could be out there, ramming boats and tossing around penguins, and instead we’re spending our lives commuting to work and tending to the Sisyphean labor of trying to keep our inboxes clear of bullshit?

On the other hand, maybe this is how the orcas plan to win: through spreading fear and sowing dissension. Either way: we have no choice but to stan.