Hau’oli Makahiki Hou!
We finished off our 2021 Whale Watching with some great sightings on our Friday Wake Up with the Whales Cruise. Before we even left the bay we saw a whale breach out to the west, but after watching for a bit we realized that he wasn’t going to breach again, so we took a right hand turn and headed north.
That turned out to be a good idea, because we soon found ourselves between three different pods of 2 whales. One of these pods was twisting and turning a bit on the surface — we couldn’t tell for sure what they were doing but they definitely were interacting. The second pair were diving and surfacing in sync with each other. The third pair were definitely two different sizes (maybe a Mom/yearling?). We watched all 3 pods for quite awhile and got to see some great views of their flukes when the whales decided to sound.
When we deployed our hydrophone, we heard some LOUD singing, so we knew there were some other close-by whales we weren’t getting to see.
Oh…and just before we turned back to the bay, we saw a few more splashes from breaching whales further to our north…but they were too far away for us to visit.
Mahalo and Hau’oli Makahiki Hou!
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Humpback Whales (and, in fact, all Baleen Whales) demonstrate something called “reverse sexual size dimorphism”. This means that an adult female Humpback is larger than an adult male (by about 5%). Though researchers are not sure of the exact reason for the difference in size, they theorize that the increased size allows the female to store more reserves to feed and care for her calf, and also to give birth to a bigger calf who might have a better chance of survival than a smaller one. Average length for a fully grown female Humpback is around 45 – 50 feet. At her heaviest, she weighs 35 – 40 tons.