Just Playing Around? Or Something Much More Serious?

Aloha,

Guests on Thursday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise from Anaeho’omalu Bay saw at least a dozen different Humpbacks. Highlights included sightings of 3 different Mom/Calf pods — and two of these pods were accompanied by escorts. The most active of the three pods was the second one. Baby was kind of squirmy at the surface, and we got to watch him do a complete breach followed by a sort-of breach. We also got to see a few breaches from mid-size lone Humpbacks who were a couple of hundred yards behind us.

We started our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise by visiting the last Mom and calf we had been watching during our first trip of the day. While we were all visiting with each other, we noticed some splashing a bit further up the coastline which turned out to be caused by two adult Humpbacks interacting. These two were laying on their sides, slapping their huge pec flippers towards each other, and then rolling over on their backs doing the same thing. Were they playing? Or were they expressing excitement, interest or maybe even boredom? Of course we have no idea why they were doing what they were doing,  but it sure was interesting to watch. Later in the cruise we were floating with our engines off and listening to the whales singing through our hydrophone when a lone Humpback approached us and swam just under the surface of the water across our bow before heading off. Then, we saw a couple of peduncle throws from some other Humpbacks and finished our cruise off with a final visit to our Mom and calf. This time, seemingly unprovoked, we watched the calf do a single breach, and amazingly, we were all looking in the right direction to see it.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: There’s a time when a whale is still in its fetal stage that it’s covered in fur. By the time the calf is born, the fur has disappeared. Many researchers believe that this is another indication that whales have evolved from an animal with a common ancestor to a hippo. The idea that the stages of an animal’s fetal development reflect evolutionary development or “Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny” was first proposed by Ernst Haeckel around 1900.