Hamming it Up

Aloha,

Guests on Monday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise from Anaeho’omalu Bay saw at least a dozen different Humpbacks. All of them seemed to be paired up — a mix of adult pairs and a couple of Mom/Baby duos too. We spent some time watching a pair of adults who decided to dive below us. While they were underwater we deployed our hydrophone and we actually had to turn our speaker volume way down because those two adults were hamming it up, singing directly into the microphone. When we pulled the hydrophone back out of the water, at first we thought some of the guests onboard were kidding around and mimicking the Humpback songs until we realized that we were now listening to our two Humpbacks without the benefit of the microphone at all  — they were so loud and so close that their voices were reverberating through the hulls of the boat.

We also saw about a dozen Humpbacks during our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise including 3 different Mom/Baby pairs, and two of these pairs were accompanied by an escort. One of our Moms spent some time lifting her pec flipper out of the water, waving it around but not slapping it on the surface. We also got some wonderful close-up views of two of these Mom/Baby pairs when they surfaced right near our bow, and then swam under us, surfaced near the starboard rail, and swam right down the side of the boat. The first encounter was at the beginning of our cruise, and the second time it happened it was at the end of the cruise giving us a fantastic finale to the trip.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Here’s something we don’t talk about often…the thousands of Humpbacks visiting Hawaii each winter inevitably produce all kinds of waste products (skin cells, pee, poop, milk leakage, placentas and even dead bodies) and these waste products definitely affect our nearshore coastal environment. But in this case, the effects are positive ones! A new study published in the March edition of Nature Communications discusses the lateral movement of nitrogen and other nutrients from the rich cold waters where the whales feed to the nutrient-poor warm water areas where they breed (in our case, from Alaska to Hawaii). The researchers posit that this conveyer belt of nutrients acts like a compost pile allowing for enhanced growth of phytoplankton in our near-coastal waters. Since phytoplankton form the basis of the food chain, everyone benefits from the waste of whales. You can read more about this fascinating research here, and even see a photo of a Humpback urine (if you’re as into this kind of thing as we are).