Mom and Baby? Or Hawaii’s Loch Ness Monster? Image courtesy of Jez Perez
Guests on Wednesday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise got to know a Mom/Baby pod of Humpbacks pretty well. We first spotted their spouts to the south of the harbor so we headed over to take a look at them. Mom appeared to be pretty small (maybe 35 – 38 feet long), so we’re guessing this may have been her first calf. The baby looked to be about a third of her length, and from what we could see, was definitely not a newborn (his dorsal fin wasn’t completely bent over). The two of them appeared to be fairly relaxed for most of the time we watched them, but at one point baby decided to breach, at the same time that Mom decided to lift her flukes (see the image above courtesy of our own Jez Perez). If this had been our first glimpse of them, we might have thought we were looking at a broken U-shaped sea creature…or maybe Hawaii’s version of the Loch Ness Monster!
Oh…and since we got to stay in the same area for a long time, we deployed the hydrophone and got to eavesdrop on many Humpback conversations taking place underwater all around us.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Though the Humpbacks we see average between 40 and perhaps 50 feet long, there is anecdotal evidence that the largest Humpback killed by whalers was 88 feet long. This Humpback was taken in the Caribbean.