Kawaihae Nursery School

Aloha,

Guests on Tuesday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise from Kawaihae got to spend some quality time with a Mom/Calf/Escort Pod. Both Mom and the Escort were big whales so obviously this wasn’t Mom’s first rodeo. Like most experienced Moms (of any species), this Mom kept an eye on her calf but allowed him to explore a bit. Baby breached 3 different times during our visit. When we could take our eyes off this pod, we saw a few spouts here and there but all of them were pretty far from us. We got a chance to deploy our hydrophone while “our” pod was underwater and we’re pretty sure that the louder distinct sounds we heard were from them, but we also heard a cacophony of quieter voices from whales in the distance.

Guests on our 10:30 Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise got to observe a different Mom/calf pod. This pod wasn’t accompanied by an escort, and while we watched we saw them each surface and spout many times. As per typical behavior for a Mom, she didn’t show her flukes when she dove (since she wasn’t diving deeply) — she basically just sank below the waves. The biggest “wow” moment of the cruise happened when a big Humpback surfaced about 30 yards off our bow, spouted twice, and then lifted his flukes before diving. We had no idea where he had come from as we hadn’t seen any spouts in the direction we had been heading before he surfaced to surprise us.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: The barnacles called “Coronula diadema” (see the image above) live only on whales and primarily on Humpback Whales, seeming to prefer to live on areas of the whale where the water flow is consistent (chin and fins). Though researchers aren’t sure how the barnacle can even find a whale to live on, there is some speculation that because the barnacles are spawning during the winter in Hawaii, the whales here are swimming in “barnacle larvae soup”. When a whale swims by, those “baby” barnacles chemically sense it, and hop on where ever they can. They use their antennae as “feet’ and walk around the whale till they find a suitable spot (which can take quite a while… if the barnacle were the size of a person, the whale would be 20 miles long). Once they find a spot they like, they flip over and produce tube-shaped cavities in their shells that actually draw in prongs of growing whale skin, holding their position on the whale for life. Incidentally, since barnacles cement themselves in place before reaching sexual maturity, reproduction isn’t easy for them. They can’t leave their shells to mate, so they’ve developed extremely long male reproductive organs – in fact they have the largest penis-to-body size ratio of any known animal.