Old Tom: The Orca Who Hunted Whales With Humans

Fishermen and orcas are natural rivals - both hunting the same waters, both chasing the same prey. But in the small Australian town of Eden, on the south coast of New South Wales, a pod of wild killer whales spent roughly 70 years doing something with no real parallel anywhere else in the world: working with the local whalers instead of against them.

A Whale-Hunting Alarm System

The partnership centered on an orca the whalers called Old Tom. From the 1860s until his death in 1930, Old Tom led a pod of 20 to 30 killer whales in and around Twofold Bay. When the pod spotted a baleen whale migrating along the coast, they would herd it toward the bay, then Old Tom would swim to the mouth of the Kiah River and slap his tail against the surface - a sound the Davidson whaling family came to recognize instantly. Locals called it "flop-tailing," and it worked like a knock on the door. The whalers grabbed their oars and rowed out, whether it was daylight or well after dark.

The Law of the Tongue

Once a whale was harpooned, the orcas did not fight the whalers for it. Instead, an unspoken arrangement later nicknamed the Law of the Tongue governed how the catch was split. The whalers anchored the dead whale offshore overnight and let the orcas feed on the tongue and lips before hauling in the rest for blubber and bone. Three generations of the Davidson family relied on this system, passed down from Alexander Davidson, who began whaling out of Eden in 1857, to his son John and grandson George.

Proof You Can Still See Today

Old Tom did not just watch the hunts. He sometimes grabbed the tow rope in his teeth to help pull a harpooned whale or a whaleboat through the water. That habit left a permanent mark. When his body was found floating in Twofold Bay in September 1930 and his skeleton was later preserved, his teeth were found worn down into half-circle grooves from decades of gripping fast-moving rope.

His skeleton hangs today in the Eden Killer Whale Museum, built specifically to house it. It remains the clearest physical evidence of a partnership that a 2023 DNA study suggests was likely one of a kind. Researchers found no evidence that Old Tom or his pod left any surviving descendants, making the decades-long alliance a closed chapter in history.