News - An orca species that helped humans hunt whales for thousands of years may now be extinct

For thousands of years, the Thaua people—members of the Yuin nation in eastern Australia—had an exceptional whale hunting strategy, a new study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Heredity described, Business Insider reported. Thaua hunters learned that they could work together with orcas in Australia's Twofold Bay, helping lead them straight to their prey. Some Thaua hunters even sang to the orcas to encourage them to herd whales inland. This relationship lasted for generations until the 1930s—about 150 years after British colonizers arrived in Australia—when the orcas vanished from the region. It was long unclear what happened to the orcas. But thanks to DNA analysis of a 23-foot-long orca skeleton from almost 100 years ago and knowledge from the Thaua people, scientists now believe the species is locally extinct.