Just Playing Around

Aloha,

It took us only about 20 minutes to find our first Humpbacks during our Saturday Wake up with the Whales Cruise – a Momma Humpback and her calf. These two were busily expressing something to each other (or maybe they were just playing around) because we must have seen 50 pectoral slaps in the 45 minutes they were with us. Later in the cruise we were surprised when a different Mom/Baby pod surfaced less than 20 feet off our bow before sliding back underwater.

Guests on our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise got a couple of good looks at a pod of two adult whales who surfaced around 40 yards from us. We also found another Mom/Baby pod. These two whales were surfacing every 7 minutes, spouting, and then heading back underwater. When we deployed our hydrophone during both of our trips we heard many, many Humpback voices, so once again, we knew there were a lot of whales in our area who we weren’t seeing at the surface.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day:  During last Tuesday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise we witnessed some pretty intense interactions between two Humpbacks, causing us to question whether we were actually watching these two mating (or getting ready to mate). So I decided to delve into the published research to see how the experts described Humpback mating behaviors. As it turns out, though a lot of the social behaviors of Humpbacks have been observed, documented and studied, their sexual behaviors have not. In February of 2024, researchers published a unique paper documenting observations of non-reproductive sexual behavior between two male Humpbacks off the coast of Maui, one of whom was visibly injured and in poor health (based on the proliferation of whale lice on his skin). The healthy male whale was observed penetrating the injured male whale and holding on to him with his pectoral flippers. The researchers didn’t assign a motive to the behavior except to suggest that it was either a case of mistaken identity, reinforcement of a social relationship, or perhaps an agonistic expression of dominance from the healthy whale over the weaker whale. Of course the interaction between the two Humpbacks documented in the research report didn’t exactly mimic what we observed last week, but since we weren’t able to get photographic evidence of what was going on between “our” whales underwater, we can only draw parallels between what we could see, and what the researchers documented. You can read more about this interesting study here (and see some pretty fascinating photos too).