some type of adult girl

clarabeau:

clarabeau:

I spent last night drinking too much wine and reading everything I could find about the Eden Killers.

Between 1840 and 1930 on the coast of Australia, a pod of orcas formed an alliance with three generations of whalers from a particular family, the Davidsons. After herding a baleen whale into Twofold Bay, an orca would swim up into the Kiah River to two isolated houses owned by the Davidsons and breach or smack its fluke loudly on the water.

Once the Davidsons rowed out, the orca would lead them to the baleen whale and the pod would help with the hunt, trapping the whale and attacking it to the point of exhaustion, ripping at fins, diving over their blowholes, and forcing them into shallower waters for the whalers to finish off. After the whale was killed, the Davidsons would tie a small buoy to it and leave it. The orcas would eat the lips and tongue of the whale, then a few days later, the whalers would return and haul the rest of the carcass back to shore for processing. The Davidsons called this arrangement “The Law of the Tongue.”

The Davidsons never used motorboats or bomb guns, since the sound distressed the orcas. The orcas could differentiate between the Davidsons’ green rowboats and the boats of competitors, and it’s likely they recognized the individual whalers by face. The whalers would disentangle any orcas who became tangled in the ropes, and if any whaler fell out of the flimsy skiffs, the orcas would nudge them back up to the boats, circling them to protect them from sharks.

The pictures above are shots of the one of the lead orcas, Old Tom. The partnership is said to have ended after his death, after the decline of humpbacks in the area, or after a vagrant knifed one of the orcas on the beach. In the last scenario, the pod is said to have left immediately and never returned.

A year later and you wouldn’t believe how many people I’ve tried to hit on by telling them about this!

(via witchydarling)