Aloha,
Guests on Monday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise got to see spouts from 7 different Humpbacks, including a Mom and Baby who spent about 15 minutes hanging out with us. We had one of those magical moments during this cruise when we were all looking at the right spot to see baby breach! We had another magical moment too. We had been listening to some incredible whale sounds over our hydrophone…so loud, and so clear…and after about 20 minutes, the songs stopped. We looked around and suddenly, a whale surfaced right besides us. We’re almost certain this was the singer…we hardly ever get to SEE the whales we’re listening to.
We also ran a couple of cruises on Alala from Kawaihae. The first was a special Educational Cruise for the keiki from the Hawaii Montessori School. We saw multiple spouts during this cruise, and the kids loved it. On our 10:00 Cruise, we saw lots of spouts too. The best sightings were way south of the harbor, off shore of the Mauna Lani. We never found the Mom and baby the other boats were talking about, but we did have multiple sightings of a couple of big adult Humpbacks.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Researchers studying the totally geographically isolated Arabian Sea Humpbacks have recently noted that these Humpbacks sing songs that are a whole level less complex than the songs Humpbacks in every other ocean of the world sing. Arabian Humpback songs are comprised of notes, making phrases, which are repeated in the same order, while other Humpbacks group the phrases into themes and the repeated themes comprise the song. If I’m interpreting this correctly, the Arabian Humpbacks’ version of say “Old McDonald Had a Farm” would feature only one farm animal, and they’d be singing about that one animal over and over and over. Humpbacks elsewhere would be able to use the structured verse to sing about lots of different animals on the farm…If there are any music theorists out there please help me out!