Movie Monday: ‘Killer’ Whales

“A fish tougher and more terrible.”

At a quarter past twelve on 9 March 1976, some 560 miles north of the equator and a very long way from anyone, something hit the bow of the yacht Guia III hard enough to shift it three metres sideways.

Claudio Cuoghi was at the helm and had felt nothing coming. By the time Giorgio Di Mola got below, the forward compartment was already full. The breach was well beneath the waterline and far too large to plug; two spinnaker bags stuffed into it were sucked straight back out, taking a crewman’s arm most of the way with them. Sails passed under the hull were torn away. The batteries went under before a proper mayday could get out. Jérôme Poncet, skippering that leg of the Atlantic Triangle, said afterwards that not even God could have saved her.

She sank bow-first. The crew got into an inflatable with fourteen litres of water between them and were picked up around midnight the following day, having fired flares at a passing ship. Within the week they were at the Waldorf Astoria as guests of Whitbread, which was rather the point of the race in the first place.

There were five orcas around the boat while she went down. One of them lay against the hull, entirely still, in a posture that Francesco Longanesi Cattani could only describe as the animal trying to work out what sort of creature Guia was. On deck, another crewman was shouting that the whale had come to murder them. When the yacht finally went under, the orcas left.

Two readings of the same animal, in the same four minutes, from men standing five feet apart. One of them describes an intelligent predator investigating an unfamiliar object. The other describes a monster. Fifty years on we are still choosing between them, and the record of which one we picked, and when, and why, is largely a record of what was showing at the cinema.

The killer, dismissed

Before the orca could be a monster, it had to be worth noticing, and for most of the written record it was not.

The sixteenth-century naturalists were happy enough with sea monsters in the abstract — Konrad von Gesner and Ulisse Aldrovandi both produced cetaceans of extravagant proportions, ship-devouring things with fountains erupting from their skulls — but these were whales in general, monstrous by category rather than by species. The orca had no particular billing.

Melville, three centuries later, gives it a paragraph and a shrug. In the Cetology chapter of Moby-Dick, Ishmael admits that the Nantucketer knows little of this whale and the naturalist nothing at all. He allows that it is savage, that it will fasten onto the lip of a larger whale and hang there like a leech until the bigger animal is worried to death. Then he loses interest. The killer is never hunted, he notes, and he has no idea what sort of oil it yields. He objects to the name on grounds of imprecision, and delivers the line that has outlived the rest of the passage by a comfortable margin: For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and sharks included.

There is something almost funny about this. The monster slot in the greatest whaling novel ever written goes to the sperm whale — an animal that mostly wants to be left alone in the dark eating squid — while the actual apex predator of the world ocean gets four sentences and a note that nobody bothers with it.

What did exist was testimony, and the testimony has always been more interesting than the fiction.

Two Inuit elders in the Foxe Basin passed on an account of a young man in 1955 who ignored advice about the thinness of the ice over Grand Suttie Bay, walked out over a polynya where orcas were trapped, and was taken when the whales deliberately broke the ice beneath him. It is oral history, it cannot be verified, and it is entirely possible that it is a cautionary tale about listening to your elders wearing a whale as a costume. But it should not be waved away either. It comes from people who lived and hunted alongside these animals in conditions no marine biologist has ever worked in, and it describes something behaviourally coherent — orcas breaking ice from below is documented hunting behaviour, not invention.

We have a photograph of very nearly the same thing. In the early 1910s, during the Terra Nova expedition, a pod of Antarctic pack-ice orcas made a determined attempt to wave-wash a photographer and a team of sledge dogs off an ice floe. Pack-ice orcas specialise in washing seals off floes. The dogs were barking. Nobody was hurt, and the modern reading is that the whales were doing exactly what they always do, to what they reasonably believed were seals.

And then, in the space of four months in 1972, the two incidents that ought to have given anyone writing a killer whale film all the material they needed.

In June, Dougal Robertson’s forty-three-foot schooner Lucette was struck by orcas 200 miles west of the Galápagos and sank in about a minute, putting his family into a raft and a dinghy for thirty-seven days before a Japanese fishing boat found them. In September, an eighteen-year-old surfer named Hans Kretschmer was bitten on the leg at Point Sur in California, taking something close to a hundred stitches. His doctor reportedly said it looked as though somebody had gone at his thigh with an axe.

Kretschmer’s case is the only documented instance of a wild orca injuring a human being. It is also, on inspection, the case for the defence. There were sea lions in the water. He punched the animal’s head, and it let go. He then bodysurfed to shore expecting a second strike that never came. The pattern — a single investigative bite followed by immediate release — is far more legible now than it was in 1972. The one time an orca ever laid teeth on a human in the wild, it appears to have realised its mistake and spat him out.

That is the whole evidentiary record, more or less, as it stood in the mid-1970s. A sunken schooner. A bitten surfer. Some Edwardians on an ice floe. An unverifiable story from the Canadian Arctic. Against it: an animal that had, by then, been netted, sold, towed, penned and taught to jump through hoops for the better part of a decade, and had done almost nothing about it.

Hollywood was about to fix that.

The gentle giant, and what he built

In June 1965, a young male orca drifted into a salmon net near the village of Namu in British Columbia. The fisherman who found him rang Ted Griffin, who owned the Seattle Marine Aquarium, and Griffin bought the whale for eight thousand dollars, which turned out to be the cheapest part of the exercise. Namu was towed 450 miles south in a floating pen. Crowds lined the Seattle waterfront. Aircraft circled.

Namu became the first captive orca to perform in the water with a person, and Griffin — riding him in front of paying audiences — became a local hero. There was a film, Namu, the Killer Whale, made by United Artists in 1966, in which a marine biologist befriends a misunderstood whale and must persuade frightened fishermen that the animal is gentle. There was a theme song. There was, in the space of about eighteen months, a wholesale reversal of the killer whale’s public reputation from oceanic vermin to enormous friendly dog.

Namu died on 9 July 1966, having survived just over a year. He had picked up a bacterial infection from the polluted water of his pen; weakened, he became entangled in the cables of his enclosure and drowned. Griffin later said he wished the whale had succeeded in what he chose to describe as a break for freedom.

Here is the fact around which everything else in this essay orbits. The film that taught the world to love orcas is the film that built the industry that killed them. Demand for a Namu of one’s own was immediate and enormous. Griffin founded a whale-catching company to supply the marine parks; his best customer was SeaWorld. He took the calf who became the original Shamu, having harpooned her mother. By 1970 the Penn Cove captures were using boats, aircraft and explosives to round up young whales in Puget Sound, and four calves drowned in the nets. The bodies were weighted and sunk. They were found the next day.

None of this was a betrayal of the gentle-giant story. It was the direct commercial consequence of it. You cannot sell tickets to see a monster up close. You can sell an enormous number of tickets to see a friend.

Find me a fish

In the middle of the night in 1975, Dino De Laurentiis telephoned the screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni. Vincenzoni admitted to having seen Jaws. De Laurentiis instructed him to go and find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white.

Vincenzoni, by his own account, had no interest in marine life whatsoever. His brother Adriano, who did, pointed him towards killer whales. The orca is not a fish, but that has never been the sort of objection that slows a producer down.

What emerged was Orca, directed by Michael Anderson, shot largely around Petty Harbour in Newfoundland, released by Paramount in July 1977 on a budget of six or seven and a half million dollars, depending on whose accounting you trust, and taking $14.7 million. Ennio Morricone wrote the score, which is far better than the film deserves. Richard Harris plays the fisherman with the full-throated commitment of a man who has decided that if he is going to be in this, he is going to be in this. Charlotte Rampling is the marine biologist. Will Sampson, two years on from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is the Indigenous man who understands what the whale is doing. Bo Derek loses a leg, in case anyone had failed to spot which film was being remade.

The plot: Harris’s character harpoons a pregnant female orca. She miscarries on his deck, in a sequence still capable of clearing a room. Her mate then works through his boat, his livelihood and his town until the two of them can settle it on open water.

It is, of course, Moby-Dick turned inside out. Melville’s whale is a blank onto which Ahab projects everything; the horror is that we cannot know whether there is anything behind it. Vincenzoni’s whale has motive, grief, a plan, and something close to a legal case. The animal Melville could not be bothered to describe has become the only character in the film with a coherent inner life.

The phone call

Which brings us back to Guia III, and to the strangest document in this whole story.

In the weeks after the sinking, Giorgio Falck received a telephone call from Los Angeles. The caller introduced himself as a friend of Falck’s brother-in-law. He gave his name as Vincenzoni. He said he had been studying killer whales for three years and was writing a book about them.

He then told Falck a story. In New Zealand, a fishing boat had injured a female orca with its propeller. The male had sunk the boat — and he was careful with the detail, noting the vessel’s seventy-millimetre planking against Guia‘s thirty-five. A month later, in the same place, the same animal had killed a crew of six.

That is the plot of Orca, related as established fact, to a man who had just lost his boat, sixteen months before Paramount put it in cinemas.

I cannot prove that this was Luciano Vincenzoni, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The claim of three years’ study sits awkwardly against a brief handed down in 1975, and it is at least possible that the caller was his brother Adriano, the one with the zoological interest. But the call came from Los Angeles. The surname is not common. The timing lands precisely inside the film’s development. And the anecdote is not merely similar to Orca‘s premise; it is Orca‘s premise, with the numbers filed off. On the balance of everything we know, this is the film being written, out loud, down a transatlantic line, to a survivor.

It is worth pausing on what that story actually asserts. Six people killed by a single orca would be, by a wide margin, the worst loss of human life to a killer whale ever recorded anywhere. It appears in no register, no report, no scientific literature. Somebody in Los Angeles in 1976 was collecting atrocity stories about killer whales, and either could not tell or did not care which of them were true.

And then Falck — who had every reason on earth to want a monster, who had just watched a boat he loved go down and who describes the orca as a hateful animal — refuses the story flat. He tells the caller he is perfectly aware sea monsters are in vogue since Jaws. He is aware that Guia‘s sinking is of interest chiefly because it happens to involve a topical one. But he is interested in boats and in racing, not in orcas and not in violence.

The man with the strongest possible claim on the revenge narrative would not take it. It was offered to him by a screenwriter, and he handed it back.

Yaka, Nepo, and the whales in the lorries

Orca was made with real whales, and this is where the film stops being merely silly and becomes something closer to evidence.

The two animals identified as the film’s leads are Yaka and Nepo. They were captured together on 11 December 1969 at Pender Harbour in British Columbia, when a group of twelve orcas — Northern Residents, a fish-eating population — was surrounded in a storm and six young animals taken. Yaka was around a year old. Nepo was around two. They were podmates. They were sold together, moved to Marine World in California on 28 December, and put in a tank with an older female called Kianu.

For a few years the three of them did well enough. Kianu grew possessive of Nepo and aggressive towards Yaka, and was sold to Japan in April 1978, which left the two survivors of the Pender Harbour capture alone together. The park hoped Yaka would breed. She never did.

Nepo died on 10 July 1980, of acute bronchopneumonia and kidney disease, at roughly twelve or thirteen years old. Yaka was beside his body and reportedly would not leave it, and afterwards stopped eating and stopped engaging with her trainers. A companion was brought in, an Icelandic female called Vigga, and the two of them performed together for over a decade. Yaka died on 29 October 1997 of a respiratory infection, having spent nearly twenty-eight years in tanks. She had been taken from the sea before she was old enough to have learned to hunt in it.

Marineland of the Pacific also supplied whales to the production, and the likeliest candidate there is Corky II, taken in the same 1969 round-up, though the crediting on this has been muddled for decades and I would not swear to the detail.

They are, by any reasonable measure, wonderful in the film. They are also, by any reasonable measure, giving away the entire game, because their dorsal fins have collapsed. It is a condition essentially unknown in wild males and rare in wild females, and near-universal in animals held long-term in tanks. It is on screen. In a film about a wild orca’s stolen family. In 1977. Nobody in the production appears to have thought it worth a comment.

Because the whales could obviously not be made to bite off Bo Derek’s leg or carry a corpse across a harbour, the effects team also built animatronic orcas out of rubber. These were good. They were good enough that when they were driven to set, animal rights activists blocked the lorries, believing there were live whales inside.

Sit with the shape of that for a moment. Protestors on a road in the mid-seventies, correctly identifying the crime, correctly identifying that whales were being trucked about for entertainment, and stopping entirely the wrong vehicle. The animals they were trying to save were not in the lorries. They were already at the park, already performing twice a day, and had been for six years. They would go on doing it for another twenty.

The door closes

Free Willy arrived in 1993 with a plot about a boy liberating a captive orca, and had the singular distinction of generating a real liberation campaign for its own star. Keiko had been captured off Iceland and was living in a small tank in Mexico City. Public pressure moved him to Oregon, then to Iceland, then to a sea pen; he eventually swam to Norway, where he died in 2003. Whether it worked depends entirely on what you thought it was for. He never rejoined a pod. He also spent his last years in the sea.

Then 2013, and Blackfish, and the argument was effectively over. What the film did was not reveal that captivity was cruel — people had been saying so since Namu — but connect the cruelty to the deaths of specific named human beings, and make the connection impossible to un-see. Every human being ever killed by an orca has been killed by a captive one. There is no confirmed fatal attack by a wild killer whale anywhere in the record, ever. The animal only becomes a man-killer inside a tank.

That is a devastating fact for a monster movie. It means the horror cannot be located in the animal. It can only be located in us.

The film that argues itself out of existence

Killer Whale arrived in January 2026, directed by Jo-Anne Brechin and co-written with Katharine E. McPhee, distributed by Lionsgate. Ceto is an orca held in a Thai marine park; after she kills a janitor, the management dumps her into the open sea. Two friends on holiday end up trapped in a lagoon with her.

On paper this should work. The premise carries genuine moral charge, the animal has a real grievance, and the audience arrives pre-loaded with everything Blackfish taught them. The film reviewed catastrophically — twenty per cent on the Tomatometer, and, more tellingly, twenty-one per cent with audiences.

The reviews are unusually consistent about why. Screen Rant found it succeeded as a sombre meditation on captivity and failed as a survival film, and concluded that the director was less interested in making something vicious than in condemning what had been done to the whale. Rue Morgue put its finger on the structural problem: the film cannot decide whether Ceto is an object of fear or of sympathy, and so makes the woman who cares most about her into her principal victim. The film even puts the argument for the defence into its own dialogue, noting that the only recorded fatalities have involved captive animals — a point one reviewer observed, drily, that nobody watching was going to care about.

So the received wisdom is that the captivity angle should have given the film an edge, and the evidence is that it did precisely the opposite. It disarmed it. You cannot frighten an audience with an animal they have already acquitted. The moment you explain why she is angry, you have converted your monster into a plaintiff, and the remaining eighty minutes become a courtroom drama in which everybody has already agreed on the verdict.

The orca is, I think, the only screen monster we have successfully talked ourselves out of. We know perfectly well that sharks are misrepresented and ecologically vital, and The Meg still took a billion dollars. We know bears are not malevolent and we still watch films about them eating people. But the orca’s rehabilitation was so recent, so total, and so specifically bound up in the story of its captivity that the monster no longer fits inside the animal. There is nowhere left to put it.

The revenge was always ours

And then, in May 2020, the whales started sinking boats.

Off the Iberian Peninsula, orcas began ramming vessels and biting the rudders off sailing yachts. By the middle of 2025 there had been more than 750 recorded encounters, over 250 boats damaged, and at least six sunk. The behaviour spread. The press adored it. The animals were assigned the collective designation “Gladis”, after Orcinus gladiator — whale-fighter — and the internet did what the internet does. They were called comrades by a labour organiser and by a newspaper columnist. Merriam-Webster announced that it welcomed its new Delphinidae overlords. A revenge fantasy that Paramount could not sell in 1977 was, in 2023, the most popular story in the world.

Except that it is not a revenge fantasy. It is fifteen animals.

The Iberian orcas are a genetically and culturally distinct subpopulation, listed by the IUCN as Critically Endangered since 2019, numbering fewer than forty individuals in total, and dependent on Atlantic bluefin tuna, which has its own problems. Around fifteen of them have taken part in the boat interactions: eleven juveniles and four adult females, with no identifiable ringleader. The rate is falling — 207 interactions in 2023, 136 in 2024, 125 the year after. Nobody has been hurt. Not once, in over 750 encounters. As GTOA’s Alfredo López has pointed out, they do not come in hard and sink the boat, which they could do easily if that were the objective.

Fifteen adolescent whales from a population smaller than a decent pub quiz turnout, most of them apparently playing, against which we have constructed an international narrative of maritime vengeance.

And here is the fact that ought to end the argument. Through the 1960s and 1970s, while Pacific orcas were being chased by aircraft, herded with explosives, netted, and stripped of their young — while Yaka and Nepo were being taken, sold, and put to work — those whales did not attack boats. Not one. There is almost no evidence that wild killer whales seek revenge at all. A chimpanzee robbed of food will retaliate. An aggrieved macaque will settle the score, sometimes against a relative of the offender. Orcas do not do this. The trainers killed in the parks were killed by animals that researchers believe were psychologically wrecked by the conditions they were kept in, which is not revenge either. It is something worse and much sadder.

The revenge was never theirs. We wrote it. We filmed it, using the actual victims as extras, in a park, for money. And half a century later, when a handful of bored teenagers off Cádiz started snapping rudders for reasons no one can establish, we recognised our own script and gave it a standing ovation.

The coda is uglier. Sailors are now carrying illegal firecrackers to throw at a critically endangered species. Some play death metal through speakers. Others bang steel bars against the hull. Marine mammal biologists are openly braced for someone to shoot one. The single population that has ever cost us anything is the one we are arming against, while the whales who genuinely had cause never lifted a fluke.

One of the six young orcas taken at Pender Harbour on that December night in 1969 is still alive. Corky II went to Marineland of the Pacific rather than Marine World, and to SeaWorld San Diego in 1987 when Marineland was bought and closed. She is around sixty-one. She has been in tanks for fifty-six years, longer than any orca in history. She was pregnant seven times and none of her calves lived past seven weeks. She has cataracts. She still performs.

Her siblings are alive in the water off British Columbia. When researchers played her family’s calls to her in 1993, after twenty-four years of captivity, she reacted so strongly that she was seen to shudder.

Melville thought the killer whale was hardly worth the ink. Namu made it loveable, and the loveliness built the tanks. De Laurentiis wanted a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white, and got a mammal that has never knowingly killed anybody. Killer Whale discovered in 2026 that you cannot run a monster movie on an animal the audience has already forgiven.

And a whale who is very probably in Orca is still swimming in circles in San Diego, forty-nine years after the film came out, having been cast as the monster in a story about her own abduction, and having never in fifty-six years done a single thing to deserve the part.

Man-eater Monday: Gustave the Crocodile

Last week, I happened to be in Oxford on a rainy day, and so, found myself at the UK’s only crocodile zoo – Crocodiles of the World, near Brize Norton. And one of the showpiece spectacles is their feeding of the 26 Nile crocodiles they have in the collection.

It was quite something to behold. But despite the many snapping jaws, and many being over two metres or more in length, they were still diminutive compared to a certain legendary Nile.

One named Gustave.

The Animal

Gustave is — or was — a Nile crocodile of extraordinary size. Estimates put him at somewhere between five and a half and six metres in length, making him one of the largest crocodiles ever reliably documented. His weight has been guessed at over nine hundred kilograms. These figures carry the usual caveats: he was never captured and therefore never officially measured. But even accounting for a little over estimation, Gustave appears to have been a genuinely massive animal, an outlier among outliers, operating in the Ruzizi River delta and along the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika near Bujumbura.

Gustave next to some smaller, more typical-sized Nile crocodiles.

It wasn’t just Gustave’s size that made him easy to identify at a distance. He had a grouping of scars along his right rear flank put there by machine gun fire and another visible patch of pink scarring on his right shoulder from either a spear or homemade harpoon. These and other marks were accumulated through decades of encounters he walked, swam, or slithered away from.

He also had two large bony projections on top of his head that seemed to have fused at the rear, something noticed and commented on in the 2004 documentary Capturing the Killer Croc.

And he was old. Dr Alison Leslie, who observed Gustave in the early 2000s first thought he was maybe 100 years old due to his size. But his excellent and full set of dentition meant he was more likely around the age of 60, and still growing. Niles have a typical optimal lifespan of around 70 years in the wild.

Either way, his size and age, if reliably estimated, combined to produce an animal that operated by slightly different rules. For instance, in 2003, a park ranger observed Gustave stalk, kill, and devour an adult hippopotamus – something unheard of.

Another of those differences was something that researchers and locals often observed about his kills. Crocodiles, like all predators, typically don’t kill more than they can eat, or close to it. Yet Gustave appeared to kill well beyond that threshold with reports of multiple victims in a single event, before disappearing for periods. One theory holds that his sheer size made conventional feeding mechanics difficult: he was perhaps too large to roll prey underwater efficiently.

Another possibility, darker and less comfortable, is that the behaviour was simply something akin to personality – Gustave killed because he could. As the dominant animal in whatever patch of river he claimed, his age and size combined with highly territorial instincts would make his mere presence a threat. Whatever the mechanism, the pattern meant that the kill estimates grew, and kept growing, and eventually became uncountable.

The number of alleged human fatalities, between 60 and 300, tells you everything about the problem of documenting Gustave’s victims. Attacks along the Ruzizi and the Tanganyika shore were rarely reported to any central authority. Many victims were fishermen, or people collecting water, in communities with limited access to formal record-keeping. The lower figure probably reflects confirmed attributions; the upper figure is folk accounting and accumulation, the number that feels true even if it can’t be proven. The real figure is somewhere in there, which is its own kind of horror.

My own observation is that Gustave was clearly capable of taking large prey, having been documented attacking the hippopotamus mentioned earlier, other crocodiles, and a mature cow – which was caught on camera. Many of his human victims were found drowned and not devoured (but not all by any means). I think its likely that these kills were either territorial or perhaps those discovered before Gustave could return to them: although the idea of crocodiles storing meat underwater to tenderise the meat is something of a myth (they prefer fresh meat almost always), they have been observed caching larger prey and leftovers in places where the carcass won’t be swept away by strong currents. However, the kills may have also been instinctual: the riverbanks that Gustave called home were often popular with fishermen and their presence may have been too tempting. But perhaps afterwards, Gustave decided they didn’t meet his calorific requirements.

The Man

Patrice Faye arrived in Burundi as a French expatriate and became a long-term resident, which given his interest in herpetology, isn’t surprising. Burundi is an exceptional destination for herpetologists because it sits at a unique biogeographical crossroads. Bridging the Congo River Basin, the Great Rift Valley, and the East African savanna, its isolated, high-elevation montane forests, pristine rivers, and protected nature reserves are a goldmine for discovering endemic and rediscovered reptiles and amphibians. And due to decades of political turmoil, much of the country remains under-surveyed compared to neighbouring East African nations. This offers huge potential for modern field researchers and taxonomists to uncover rare or presumed-extinct taxa.

However, by the 1990s, Patrice had become the foremost chronicler of one reptile in particular – Gustave — not as a scientist exactly, but something between a naturalist, a documentarian, and an obsessive. He photographed the crocodile. He collected accounts of attacks. And eventually he decided to catch Gustave alive.

Faye constructed a large trap. It was a massive, 10-metre steel device designed to hold a crocodile of Gustave’s dimensions. Deployed in the animal’s territory, the plan was to lure him in, secure him, and then keep him in an especially built enclosure, some 60 by 90 feet for study and I’m sure as a potential attraction.

We’ll never know, as after the trap was deployed. Gustave ignored it. He showed some curiosity once live bait was introduced, but never ventured into it.

The 2004 National Geographic/PBS documentary Capturing the Killer Croc followed Faye’s expedition, and what it captured — unintentionally — was the peculiar comedy and pathos of human expertise confronting an animal that didn’t know it was supposed to be catchable. The crew waited. Gustave circled. On several occasions he came close enough to raise heart rates, then turned away. By the end of the documentary he had not been caught and ultimately. never has been.

There is something almost classical in the shape of this. The monster that keeps proving itself uncatchable is a very old story. What’s unusual here is that it’s a true one, documented on film, with a specific man standing at the centre of it — wading into a Burundian river, looking for something he couldn’t quite reach.

The Legend

Here is the moment Gustave crossed from animal into myth: sometime in the mid-2000s, while confirmed attacks were still being reported, communities around the lake began to speak about him less as a crocodile and more as a presence. A territorial entity. Something that had claimed the water and established terms. Fishermen avoided certain areas not merely out of caution but out of something closer to acknowledgement that they were operating in Gustave’s space, and that he might enforce that.

His own skin was a pockmarked testimony of his un-killable nature. And his intelligence was almost supernatural. Faye and other scientists often felt outwitted and out manoeuvred by Gustave – that he was always somehow one step ahead. Even the trap intended for his capture was somehow dislodged. Some say it was by heavy rains. But others say Gustave walked around the cage, took the goat, and dislodged it that way.

This is how living legends get made. Not through any single dramatic act, but through the accumulation of attacks that defy logic, combined with evasions and failed attempts at capture, until the animal stops being an animal and becomes an idea. Gustave’s unusual size also certainly added to his legendary status.

But here is something Burundi’s killer croc has probably never been told: he is very probably now dead.

The rumours have circulated since around 2019 — that Gustave, the most feared predator in Burundi, the Nile crocodile estimated to have killed somewhere between sixty and three hundred people, died quietly somewhere in the reed beds along Lake Tanganyika. No body. No confirmed sighting in years. Just the slow absence of a presence.

The probable death, if the 2019 rumours are true, is interesting precisely because of how little it has settled. There was no body. No confirmed final sighting. No Faye standing over something conclusive. The absence of evidence is indistinguishable, at this distance, from a six-metre crocodile lying low in deep water. And so Gustave continues to circulate — in articles, in forums, in conversations. Here, now, in this one.

It should be noted that Faye was arrested and imprisoned in Burundi in 2011, on five charges of rape, serving a 25-year sentence. Although the case must be taken seriously for obvious reasons, it is marred by possible corruption and questionable proceedings. However, the point is that since 2011, Gustave’s main documenter has been out of the game. So maybe, just maybe, Gustave still stalks the riverbanks of the Ruzizi River delta and the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika

The Honest Admission

There is something worth acknowledging about the fact that the people most fascinated by Gustave — researchers, filmmakers, writers, readers of blogs like this one — are, on some level, rooting for him. Not for the attacks. Not for the deaths, which were real and brutal and happened mostly to people living modest lives beside a beautiful lake. But for the persistence of the animal itself.

It is difficult to explain this without sounding callous, so let’s try to be precise: what people are rooting for is the idea that something this large, this old, this impervious, is still out there. That the world is still a place where a creature can operate entirely on its own terms, evading every trap, outlasting every pursuit, accumulating a toll that becomes legend — and then disappearing, silently, on its own schedule.

We built our categories — man-eater, monster, legend — and Gustave filled them all without ever being asked.

And ultimately, we must consider the part humans played in creating the circumstances that enabled or even drove Gustave towards becoming a man-eater. In the 1950s, when Gustave was less than two metres long and barely ten years old, Burundi’s deltas were home to buffalo, elephant, warthog, and wild herds of numerous antelope. But each was made geographically extinct in a few short years. The only wild large mammal to survive was the hippo.

It’s not hard to imagine as livestock were introduced and brought to the water’s edge that Gustave became acclimated to the presence of humans. And then, one day, after growing used to taking the cows, he missed or opportunistically targeted their human companion. And a legend was born – perhaps one that will never truly die.

The Killers of Eden

When Orcas Hunted With Whalers

The name sounds like something from folklore.

The Killers of Eden.

But these weren’t pirates. Nor outlaws. Not even a forgotten cult. They were orcas.

For decades in the nineteenth century, along the southern coast of Australia, a pod of killer whales worked in co-operation with human whalers in Twofold Bay.

They didn’t merely follow the boats or scavenge from discarded carcasses. They signalled. They herded. They hunted alongside the men. And at the centre of the story was one specific individual, a male that became known as Old Tom.

The Signal in the Bay

From the 1860s until the early twentieth century, shore-based whaling was integral to the small town of Eden.

Unlike the vast industrial fleets that would later dominate the Southern Ocean, Eden’s operations were small, open-boat enterprises run, at least to start, by a single family – the Davidsons. What made their station remarkable was not its size, but its partnership.

When migrating humpback or southern right whales entered Twofold Bay, the orcas would drive them toward shore. Old Tom, recognised by his tall dorsal fin, was known to swim to the mouth of the Kiah River and slap his tail against the surface — a deliberate “flop-tail” that alerted whalers to the presence of a whale.

Men would heed this signal and scramble into their boats. The chase would begin. And a significant ritual became an anchor to the partnership.

The arrangement became known as the “Law of the Tongue.” Once a whale was harpooned and secured, the carcass would be anchored overnight. The whalers would leave the lips and tongue, which are rich in blubber, for the orcas. The rest would be processed at the try-works.

This is important, as it clarifies the partnership as not one based on sentiment. It was mutual advantage.

Old Tom

Old Tom measured around 22 feet (6.7 metres) and weighed an estimated six tons. Distinctive wear on his lower teeth suggests he frequently gripped tow ropes during hunts. This behaviour was allegedly recorded by whalers who claimed he would sometimes take the line in his mouth and help pull the boats.

At other times, he reportedly clamped onto the rope fastened to a harpooned whale and allowed himself to be dragged through the water, an act the crews described with something like affection. Yet, a later incident of what seemed like a playful tug of war notably loosened his teeth.

He also notably returned season after season.

The documented co-operative hunts largely ceased by 1901, following a series of disruptions. One member of the pod, known as Typee, was shot by a local after becoming beached in the shallows. In the aftermath, Indigenous Australian whalers who had worked with Davidson’s crew withdrew from Kiah Inlet. At the same time, global industrial whaling expanded dramatically, and baleen whale numbers began to decline.

The ecological and economic balance that had sustained the alliance fractured.

No baleen whales were recorded in Eden after 1926.

Old Tom, however, continued to return. Often alone.

On 17 September 1930, his body was found floating in the bay. His skeleton now hangs in the Eden Killer Whale Museum, suspended in quiet testimony to a strange chapter of maritime history.

The Solitary Return

Orcas are deeply social animals. They travel in stable, matrilineal pods, maintaining lifelong bonds and passing hunting traditions across generations. Despite the folklore surrounding Old Tom, males do not lead pods. Solitary individuals are rare.

The image of Old Tom returning alone to Twofold Bay has unsettled observers for decades.

Local belief holds that the rest of his pod may have been killed further north, possibly in Jervis Bay, by Norwegian whalers unaware of the cooperative history in Eden. Elsewhere along the coast, fishermen and whalers often regarded orcas as competitors and retaliated with bullets and harpoons.

The “Killers of Eden” were never universally protected. They were tolerated, while useful.

When shore-based whaling declined after 1901 and industrial fleets reduced whale populations further offshore, the ecological conditions that had enabled the cooperation disappeared. And the behaviour vanished with them.

Cooperation or Strategy?

It is tempting to romanticise the story. Man and predator working side by side. An interspecies pact honoured through ritual.

But modern research offers a quieter explanation.

We now know that orcas exhibit:

Cultural transmission of behaviour
Specialised hunting techniques within pods
Long memory and social learning
Adaptive exploitation of predictable food sources

The Eden pod was not acting out of loyalty in a human sense. Nor were they mythic collaborators. They were intelligent apex predators exploiting a reliable opportunity.

Orcas are the largest members of the dolphin family, which is significant because bottle-nosed dolphins in Laguna, Brazil, have developed a similar, near century-old partnership with local fishermen. They signal with tail slaps and head nods when the men should cast their nets, as the pod herds the fish towards shore.

The “Law of the Tongue” was not a moral contract. It was strategy.

When overhunting reduced baleen whale numbers, and when industrialisation changed the rhythm of the bay, the strategy no longer worked. And so it ended.

The Name That Lingers

“The Killers of Eden” remains a provocative phrase. We can’t but help associate the name Eden with a place of original innocence. And killer is the name we give all deliberate predators.

Yet the title reveals as much about us as it does about them. We were the ones that christened them killers, whilst we were killing too.

Perhaps what unsettles us is not that orcas hunted alongside humans but that they adapted so fluidly to our violence. That they folded themselves, briefly, into our industry.

And when that industry collapsed, they did not mourn the contract. They adapted or vanished.

There is something more grounded in that. This story isn’t about myths, monsters, or miracles. It’s just two apex species intersecting, for a moment, in a fragile ecological alignment.

And when the balance broke, the sea closed over it.

If you enjoy reflective explorations of the uneasy boundary between humans and the wild, my novels explore similar terrain, where co-operation, fear, and instinct are rarely as simple as they seem.

Man-Eater Monday: The Sankebetsu Brown Bear Incident

In the winter of 1915, the settlement of Sankebetsu, in northern Japan, was already under strain.

Snow lay deep across Hokkaido. Food stores were thin. Travel was difficult, sometimes impossible. For the people living at the margins of cultivated land, winter was not simply a season — it was a test of endurance.

What went largely unconsidered was that the same conditions applied to everything beyond the settlement’s boundaries.

The forests were locked in ice. Natural forage was scarce. Prey animals were weakened, dispersed, or absent altogether. The winter that pressed hardest on human communities was doing the same to the wildlife around them. But at the time, this was not a connection people were trained to make.

Ecology, as a way of thinking, had not yet entered the conversation. Hardship was viewed as a human problem, unfolding against a largely static natural backdrop. The idea that animals might also be responding — adapting, learning, and changing behaviour under pressure, was rarely entertained.

It was in this context that the Sankebetsu incident began.

A first encounter and a dangerous assumption

The bear’s first appearance was not dramatic in scale, but it was decisive in consequence. In December 1915, a large brown bear entered the settlement and attacked a woman working near her home. The encounter was sudden and close-quarters. She was killed before any effective intervention could be made.

The bear did not linger. After the attack, it retreated back into the surrounding forest.

That withdrawal shaped how the incident was understood.

Within the settlement, the prevailing belief was that the animal had been startled — that the violence was reactive, not intentional, and that the danger had passed with the bear’s departure. The incident was treated as an isolated tragedy rather than the opening stage of a larger threat.

No co-ordinated hunt followed. No sustained effort was made to track the animal’s movements or assess whether it might return.

This response was not careless so much as culturally conditioned. At the time, apex predators were often viewed as opportunistic but fundamentally avoidant of humans. An animal that fled was assumed to have learned fear.

But this assumption rested on a misunderstanding of how predators learn.

An animal that kills and escapes unharmed has not seen that behaviour punished. It has been reinforced. The boundary between human and prey does not harden, it weakens.

In retrospect, the bear’s retreat was not a conclusion. It was a pause.

Escalation isn’t chaos, it’s pattern

When the bear returned, it did not behave erratically.

It came back into the settlement repeatedly, moving with increasing confidence through spaces that had already been shaped by human presence. Homes were entered. People were taken from places that should have been safe.

One of the most disturbing moments came shortly after the initial attack, when the bear returned during a funeral held for the first victim. Drawn by human activity and the presence of food, it entered the area and killed mourners gathered there.

The violence was no longer confined to a single encounter. Over the course of one night, multiple people were killed in separate attacks. By the time the bear was finally stopped, five lives had been lost, several of them within hours of one another.

What is striking, in retrospect, is not the scale of the violence, but its consistency.

The bear did not flee after these encounters. It did not act randomly. It returned to the same settlement, exploited moments of vulnerability, and withdrew only when challenged. Each successful attack reinforced the same lesson: humans were accessible, and resistance was minimal.

This is the point at which many retellings introduce the language of madness or bloodlust. But escalation, in cases like this, is rarely chaotic. It is patterned.

Under conditions of prolonged scarcity, the bear’s behaviour reflected learning rather than frenzy. What appeared to the community as senseless violence followed a grim internal logic shaped by hunger, opportunity, and success.

Human hesitation, and a belated resolution

As fear spread through the settlement, so did uncertainty.

There was disagreement over whether the same bear was responsible for each attack. Some believed the animal would eventually move on. Others feared that a co-ordinated response might provoke further violence. Time was lost to debate, hesitation, and the difficulty of acting decisively in extreme winter conditions.

When a concerted effort was finally made to track the bear, it revealed just how unprepared the community was for such a task. Weather obscured trails. Knowledge of bear behaviour was inconsistent, drawn from folklore, fragments of experience, and assumption rather than strategy.

Eventually, a group of hunters succeeded in locating and killing the animal. The bear was identified as a large male brown bear, in poor physical condition. Its body showed signs consistent with prolonged scarcity. With its death, the attacks stopped.

The immediate danger to Sankebetsu was over.

But the resolution came only after multiple lives had been lost, and only once the cost of inaction had become undeniable. The bear’s death did not mark the defeat of a monster, but the delayed recognition of a threat that had been misunderstood from the outset.

Then, and now

More than a century after the Sankebetsu incident, it is tempting to look for repetition — to imagine the same landscape quietly replaying its past.

That is not what the evidence suggests.

Brown bears still inhabit Hokkaido today. The species persists across much of the island’s forests and mountain ranges, and in some areas populations are thought to be stable or recovering after decades of decline. The region where Sankebetsu once stood is no longer a permanent settlement, and there is no indication that it has become a modern centre for serious bear attacks.

History, in this sense, is not repeating itself geographically.

What has changed is the broader context in which people and bears now coexist.

In 2025, Japan recorded 13 human fatalities and more than 100 injuries resulting from bear encounters, involving both Asiatic brown bears and Asiatic black bears. These incidents were spread across multiple prefectures and environments — from rural settlements to the edges of towns — rather than concentrated in any single location.

The pressures behind them are familiar: reduced natural food availability, changing land use, and expanding human presence in areas once less frequently occupied. Bears range more widely when resources are scarce, and humans now occupy landscapes that were once seasonal or marginal.

The relevance of Sankebetsu, then, is not that it is happening again in the same place. It is that the same ecological forces – scarcity, overlap, and hesitation, all continue to shape encounters between people and large predators, wherever clear boundaries erode.

The quieter truth of man-eater stories

The Sankebetsu bear was not a creature of myth, nor a symbol of evil. It was an animal responding to scarcity, learning from success, and moving through a landscape that no longer offered clear separation between forest and home.

Man-eater stories endure not because they reveal something monstrous about animals, but because they expose a recurring human blind spot: the tendency to see nature as static, until it reacts.

When prey disappears, boundaries blur. When boundaries blur, conflict follows.

The question is not whether such stories will happen again, but whether we recognise the conditions early enough to change the outcome.