Aloha,Guests on Tuesday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise got acquainted with a pair of Humpbacks who were on 15 minute dive cycles. We got to see them surface, spout, and sound several times as they hung with our boat.
The ocean was alive with song during our Mid-Morning Whale Watch Cruise. We got a couple of opportunities to drop our hydrophone, only to hear a veritable symphony of singing! We also got to see 6 different Humpbacks during the cruise. Most of them were cruising peacefully up the coastline, but we saw plenty of spouts, and plenty of dorsal fins, and even got a couple of great views of their flukes as the whales took turns diving underwater.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: To our untrained ears, the sounds we hear from our hydrophones sound pretty random, though we have noticed the lack of certain phrases this year that we heard fairly often last year. According to a paper published in the journal Current Biology, it turns out that our ears aren’t so untrained after all. Researchers have documented that the Humpback songs in the South Pacific are actually changing really quickly. Over the last decade, completely new song themes are appearing within a season. The researchers compared the radical evolution of the Humpbacks’ songs to human musical composition, suggesting that the themes are so novel; it’s as if whole new human musical genres were appearing that no one had ever heard just a few years ago. Want to get just a taste of the variations in Humpback songs? Click here.