Aloha,
What a difference a day makes! Though we struggled to find whales on Monday, on Tuesday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise we found a pod of two humpbacks just outside of the bay. We watched them for awhile and then headed offshore where we saw some splashing. When we arrived, we found a competitive pod of 4 whales. There was a lot of chasing going on, and a lot of aggression. We saw pec slaps, and head lunges, and heard a lot of trumpeting blows as these whales tried to catch their breath during the chase.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: In 1919, R.G. Meyers, who was working towards his PhD in Chemistry at Stanford University, conducted a chemical analysis of Humpback whale blood collected from the thoracic cavity of a whale killed in Monterey Bay. He found that the Humpbacks’ total cholesterol level was similar to a healthy human’s, but the glucose level was 4 times what’s considered a “healthy” level for a human. Since there are not a lot of carbohydrates in a Humpback’s diet, he theorized that a Humpback’s liver and pancreas work differently than ours.