over Christmas, my family and I went on holiday down the South Coast of New South Wales near a place called Eden, and visited the Whale Museum over there where we saw the skeleton of "Old Tom"-an orca-aka "killer whale",
It really is a most extraordinary story. Old Tom formed a partnership with the shore based whalers and used to lead a pack of orcas that would corner whales and then wait till the whalers arrived in their boats to kill them. The pay- off for the orcas was the tongue and lips of the whales-the whalers got everything else.
Once Old Tom-the leader of the orcas-died-shore based whaling itself died out..though of course I suppose how much was due to overharvesting and how much to Old Tom's demise is higly debatable
a whole industry that was dependent on a human- wild animal partnership..that's pretty unique
http://www.csiro.au/scinema/program/...ide_Marine.pdf