Old Tom, a particularly long-lived orca that participated in whale hunts in the early 1900s, may have sounded a call-to-arms early in the morning, or even in the middle of the night — a loud slapping of tail fins off the surface of the water.
In a small town called Eden off the coast of southeastern Australian, orca pods would alert whalers and heard humpback whales that swam through these waters every year towards the Twofold Bay area. The whalers would then get out on the water as quickly as possible to hunt.
While this mutualistic relationship between orcas and humans in Eden was extensively recorded by whalers in the 19th and early 20th century, it had likely far predated the European colonization of Australian. And according to a recent study published in the Journal of Heredity, these orcas may no longer exist.
"This story — there’s nothing else like it in the world," says Isabella Reeves, a Ph.D. candidate at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. "Without the photographic evidence it would be harder to believe."
