A Mixed Bag For Sure
March 14, 2024
Aloha,
We operated 2 Whale Watch Cruises back to back from Anaeho’omalu Bay on Wednesday and they were like night and day.
During our Wake Up with the Whales Cruise, we spent most of our time with two different Mom/Calf duos who acted like they didn’t want to wake up at all. We watched them surfacing and spouting before sinking underwater again several times, but that’s all they were doing. In the distance we saw an adult Humpback breach – but even that breach didn’t seem to wake up any other whales in the area.
Our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise was a completely different story, even though we got underway just an hour and a half after our first trip ended. This trip began with 30 minutes of non-stop breaching from a calf just 100 yards from us. After he tuckered out, we found 3 more Mom/Calf duos — and one of those calves had a spell of very active breaching too. While we were watching this little guy close-by, we could see a pair of adult Humpbacks breaching and pec slapping a bit further away. Not to be outdone by those further-away whales, our Mom/Calf duo decided to swim right towards the boat, surfacing just 10 feet from us…and they stayed there for more than 30 minutes. Oh…and we also got to see two different Humpback Moms breach only 50 yards from the boat.
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 by-products 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.