Dolphins are no longer helping out fishers

During the golden age of whaling, there was a whaling station in Twofold Bay in south-east Australia. But the fishermen did not have to go far to hunt for the cetaceans; a pod of orcas did the job for them: while some of the orcas round up the whale — right whales, the occasional humpback and even blue whales — pushing them towards the shore, others would swim towards the land, jumping and splashing in the water to attract the attention of the whalers, who only had to get into their boats to harpoon the animal. Once caught, they would leave the whale in the water for a day, giving the orcas time to eat the part of the prey that interested them: the tongue. The next morning, they would retrieve the animal to boil it and turn it into oil. In 1930, when oil had long since been replaced by petroleum and the whaling station was abandoned, the last of Twofold’s orcas died, and with it one of the rare relationships between humans and animals not based on killing the other.

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