A Welcome Surprise
Aloha,
Guests on Saturday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise spent some time with 3 different pods comprised of 2 Humpbacks each. We saw our first pod just as we were leaving the harbor, directly in front of us. These 2 whales were fully grown — and surfacing, spouting and sounding. While we were watching them, we saw another two-some to our south, between us and the harbor break-wall, in pretty shallow water. These two whales were significantly smaller than our first pod, but they were doing basically the same thing — surfacing, spouting and sounding. And then we saw yet another pod of two a bit further north, who again, were surfacing, spouting and sounding. While we were watching all these whales, we took the opportunity to deploy the hydrophone and got to listen to some very loud and clear whale voices. Just after we fired the engines back up to return to the harbor, we saw a pod of Spinner Dolphins. The dolphins clearly heard our engines as they made a b-line over to us to play in our bow wake for awhile. After they got bored with us (presumably), they swam out of the wake and headed south, so we all turned to watch them. Much to our surprise our first two big Humpbacks were now to our south and we all got to see them breach twice followed by one huge peduncle throw. What a great way to end a Whale Watch Cruise!
It took a long time for us to find Humpbacks on our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise (almost 30 minutes) but we sure weren’t bored while we looked. Why? Well first of all, we were cruising around a beautiful ocean on a beautiful boat; second, we were accompanied for most of that time by those curious Spinner Dolphins we had seen during our first cruise; and third, we had a couple of opportunities to deploy our hydrophone and our time eavesdropping on the Humpbacks was time well spent. While we were looking for close-by Humpbacks, we got to see a breach from about 800 yards away. Finally, we came across our favorite Humpback trio — Mom, her baby and an escort (for more on the role of the escort in Humpback society, see today’s Fact of the Day). This calf was really small and had that tell-tale bent dorsal fin indicating he was a very young baby. The escort was a huge whale — much bigger than Mom — but she seemed to tolerate his presence (at least during the time we were able to watch). We haven’t seen a lot of calves yet this season, so watching the baby spouting and swimming around Mom was a welcome surprise.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: We frequently see Mom and Baby Humpback accompanied by a third whale. We used to think this was a female helping mom take care of her baby, but now that we can identify gender more easily, we know it isn’t. It’s a male. Though a new mom ovulates infrequently, researchers believe that perhaps the male whale is “hoping to make a good impression” so when she is receptive, he may be the first to mate with her. Unless it’s a very strange coincidence, this escort is not the father of the calf as male Humpbacks aren’t involved in raising their own offspring. Since the gestation period for a Humpback is about a year, “Dad” was last year’s love interest.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: