Can Killer Whales Scare Off Cape Cod's Sharks?

Cape Cod lives and dies with tourism, and we live better when tourists don't die here.

It seems fair enough. However, we can't guarantee your safety. We have sharks.

We had a tourist killed last summer by a shark. It happened at the very end of tourist season, so the economic effect was dulled somewhat. If someone gets a munching in June or July, it could destroy our economy. Tourists won't go where they might be devoured.

We spent the winter kicking ideas around. Shark nets and seal culls have been discussed, as has setting bait hooks to kill the Porkers. In the end, we did nothing.

Shark attacks are rare, and Massachusetts has only had a dozen or so in our white-guy history. 4 of them were fatal. Prior to last summer, the last fatality was in 1936, off of Mattapoisett. Scituate had one 100 years before that, with Boston Harbor getting one 100+ years before the Scituate one.

Ignoring the seal influx on Cape Cod, it is easy to say, "We get a fatality once a century, the next death will be in 2118 AD or so."

That is the action we took... hope for the best.

One idea not explored involves an Orca. Killer whales are perhaps the only thing in the sea (aside from Quint) that can kill a big white.

Killer Whales work together to herd a shark, eventually cornering it. They will slam into the shark, hold it upside down and eventually suffocate it. They will then eat the shark's liver.

An Orca is the world's only functional shark repellent. When Orcas show, sharks go. A tagged shark in an area (Cali) where Orcas killed a shark immediately dove to the bottom and swam 500 nonstop miles to Hawaii.

Added bonus: Orcas don't eat people. Unless you work at Sea World, you have the same chance of being bit by an Orca as you do of being born in a manger to a virgin. There has been only one.

Killer whales are not unheard of on Cape Cod. My man Don Wilding wrote a nice article on it. 1949-1959 saw several Orca attacks on pilot whales. The Pilots would beach themselves to escape the Orcas.

Hyannis, Dennis, Yarmouth and Wellfleet all witnessed attacks on Pilot Whales, either directly or by finding Pilots with huge, Orca-sized bites taken out of them.

An estimated 67 Orcas comprise the NW Atlantic population, which range from Newfoundland to Long Island. While Cape Cod sightings are rare, they do happen.

Orcas can kill and eat anything, including Blue Whales. However, Orcas in certain areas have specific diets, and tend to specialize in certain items.

NW Atlantic versions of the Orca split into two diet groups. One group subsists on seals and especially herring (Orcas at Sea World consume 50 pounds of herring a day). The other type goes after dolphins and whales.

Sharks are off Cape Cod for seals. Orcas are here for herring. The 1940s/50s whales (Editor's note: Killer Whales are actually dolphins, but the author gets lazy now and then) may have been the ones we want here to kill and scare away sharks, but the whales we get more often are interested in herring.

Massachusetts slaughtered our seal population long ago, although we have rebounded since then. The rebound brought sharks, but not Orcas.

Whales are more intelligent than sharks, and they are more social. Why they are slow to pick up on seals being off Cape Cod, I can only guess. Maybe they are creatures of habit, maybe they prefer Labrador.

You can't hire an Orca to police our shores, and even if we got a few here, there would be no way to keep them here.

The only thing we can do with Cape Cod Orcas is hope. Hope, as we saw last September, does not deter shark attacks. Once a Cape Cod shark attack gets on CNN, there goes our summer.