An Exciting Humpback Competition

Aloha,

We experienced a heavy downpour right before we began boarding our guests for Monday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise, but the rain stopped as quickly as it had begun, so we all decided to give whale watching a try. We didn’t see a whole lot during the first part of our cruise, but then the whales started waking up, and we got to watch 4 different pods of 2 whales spouting and sounding. All of these whales were about 300 yards from us, and since the ocean was still pretty bumpy from the rain squalls, we weren’t able to travel to any of them easily. But then we spotted a ruckus on the surface which turned out to be from a competitive pod of 3 whales, and we got to watch them for a good 20 minutes. They were really interacting with each other, tail-lobbing and peduncle-throwing frequently. Since they weren’t super close to the boat, it was interesting to note the difference between when we saw them land on the surface of the water, and when we actually heard the sounds of them landing on the surface of the water. As an experiment, we lowered our hydrophone, and once we did that, we were able to hear the sounds the whales made when landing virtually simultaneously with what we were seeing (a good demonstration, as our naturalist Greg pointed out, of how much more quickly sound travels through the water than through the air). But since the ocean was still pretty bumpy, we couldn’t linger in idle long, so we brought the hydrophone back up and made our way back to the bay.
FYI, we don’t have any cruises scheduled for Tuesday, so I’ll post the next report after Wednesday’s trips.

Mahalo,

Claire

 

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day:  Why would a whale waste the energy to throw the back half of his or her body out of the water in a peduncle throw (sometimes repetitively)?? Since the whales aren’t telling, all we can do is try to interpret their behavior in terms of what else is going on in their lives at that moment. We know that Humpbacks very rarely eat while they’re in Hawaii, and since a peduncle throw is a huge expenditure of energy (if you don’t believe me, try it yourself next time you’re in the ocean), it’s got to be important to the whale. Throwing half of yourself out of the water results in a huge splash and might be a way to communicate location, health, excitement, aggression or even irritation to near-by whales (especially if the near-by whale happens to be so near that he gets landed upon)!