The True Story of Killer Whales and Their Remarkable Partnership with the Whalers of Twofold Bay.
The remarkable story of the killer whales of Eden - their skills, intelligence and their surprisingly cooperative behaviour and relationship with the nineteenth century whalers.
Killer whales are extraordinary animals. Across the oceans of the world, they are the stuff of myth and legend - and their reputation is well-earned. Killer whales are prodigious hunters attacking anything that moves in the sea, from the smallest herring to the largest blue whale. Whether beaching themselves for seals in Patagonia or knocking penguins off ice floes in Antarctica, killer whales display astonishing powers of learning, cooperation and intelligence.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the remarkable story of the killer whales of Eden. In the early nineteenth century whaling port of Eden, killer whales and human whales cooperated ruthlessly and efficiently to hunt the large baleen whales migrating along the east coast of Australia.
'Killers In Eden' tells the story of those killer whales. Far from being a fanciful and unlikely whaler's tall tale, the behaviour of the Eden whales is yet another in this species' remarkable repertoire of hunting strategies and complex relationships with humans.
Although no other killer whales have cooperated so extensively with humans before or since, the behaviour of the killer whales of Eden is perhaps not so surprising. Recent scientific research is increasingly revealing a species dependent on complex learning to survive - a creature not so different from ourselves. And the strong spiritual relationship between Aboriginal Australians and the killer whales (which formed the basis for the later whaling industry) has parallels in indigenous cultures across Europe and America.
