Those huge shiny black mammals frolicking in the Tamar River definitely are killer whales.
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``And there are plenty more where they came from,'' Hobart marine expert Fiona Hume said yesterday.
A Parks and Wildlife marine project officer, Ms Hume said that killer whales were not uncommon in the Tamar River and current ocean temperature warming could see many more arriving in the area.
Ms Hume partially attributed the upsurge in the killer whale, or orcinus orca, population around the Tamar Heads area to the loss of a large-scale whaling industry and a melting polar ice cap.
``The numbers could grow,'' Ms Hume said.
``They are definitely killer whales, you can tell by the dorsal fin,'' said Ms Hume, who noted that a photograph which appeared in The Examiner yesterday actually showed a male orca in the foreground with what appeared to be two females swimming behind him.
``The male has a much larger dorsal fin than the females,'' she said.
Some observers thought that the giant mammals may have been southern right whales, but other experts also discounted this.
Ms Hume confirmed that killer whales were often seen around Tenth Island and that they often beached to take young seals.
Meanwhile, Launceston fisherman Justin Rigby has called himself ``one of the lucky ones'' who witnessed the sight of whales in the Tamar River last Friday.
``I was fishing about 3pm at the farewell beacons at Low Head when, to my astonishment, about 10 whales appeared about 20m from the boat,'' Mr Rigby said.
``I rang my mother-in-law, who lives at Low Head, who thought they must have been dolphins but I explained that the bull was more than 20ft long and I estimated his dorsal at around 5ft,'' he added. ``She thought I was trying to tell her one of those fishing stories.''
Mr Rigby said he followed the whales to the pilot station, picked up his mother-in-law and took her to the site where she exclaimed ``killer whales''.
Mr Rigby said that he and his mother-in-law got within 5m of a whale.