Spinner Dolphins in front of us.
Aloha,
We began Thursday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise escorted by a pod of around 100 Spinner Dolphins. The dolphins played for a bit in our bow wake and as we glanced around, we saw several of them spinning and leaping. After they tired of us, we headed south and found our same, easily identifiable Mom/Calf duo that we’ve been watching for the last 4 days — the pair with the very white pectoral flippers.
Today, they were moving around quite a bit, so we never really knew where to anticipate the next spout sighting. At one point, one of our guests spotted both the whales below our bow…but after swimming under us, Momma and her calf didn’t choose to surface until they were 100 feet away. When we weren’t watching dolphins and Mom Humpback with her baby, we saw spouts from other whales in various directions too.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: What does a Humpback whale drink? We know the Humpback doesn’t sip on ocean water – he can’t because he’s a mammal and the salinity of his tissues is less than that of the ocean (so, like us, if he drank salt water, he’d dehydrate and die). We also know there’s no fresh water to drink from in the ocean. When the whale is feeding, we know he gets liquid from the tissues of the fish he’s digesting…and we know calves get liquid from their mother’s milk. But how does the Humpback survive through the breeding season when he’s not feeding? It turns out that one of the main byproducts of fat metabolism is the production of water. Humpbacks burn a lot of fat during the breeding season and because they are much more efficient users of the water they produce, they can survive. They don’t have tear ducts, sweat glands or salivary glands…and they have incredibly efficient kidneys which concentrate salt in their urine.