Pictures taken by cameras attached to the backs of albatrosses show that the huge seabirds use killer whales to help find their food for them.

Images taken in the South Atlantic help explain how foraging albatrosses find food as they cross hundreds of miles of open sea - by relying on the scraps left on the surface by the deep-diving marine mammals.

Researchers attached lipstick-sized camers to the back of four black-browed albatrosses from the breeding colonies at at Bird Island research station in South Georgia earlier this year.

Scientists from the British Atlantic Survey (BAS), the National Institute of Polar Research and Japan's Hokkaido University went through tens of thousands of images taken by the cameras, mostly showing "featureless" tracts of sea or pitch black skies at night.

Finally, they found the "killer" image - a photograph of a group of birds flying in front of the albatross with the camera and with a killer whale clearly in shot.