Singles Mingle
Aloha,
It was a “Single’s Club” for Humpbacks during our Thursday Wake Up with the Whales Cruise. In total, we saw somewhere around 10 different Humpbacks, but all of them were lone adults. Of course that’s just our interpretation of what we were seeing since none of the whales we were looking at were in touching distance of each other. For all we know though, every whale within the couple mile radius of the bay where we were travelling considered themselves part of the same pod, and their version of “mingling” is something completely different than ours. We got a couple good glimpses of these surfacing whales from about 100 yards, and when we deployed our hydrophone, we could hear some Humpback voices, but those sounds were faint, so we knew we weren’t listening to any of the whales we were watching.
Shortly after we got out of the bay on our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise we saw spouts from 3 different Humpbacks. We headed over to the smallest of the spouters, who turned out to be a calf. Mom was surfacing about every 10 minutes and the little calf was spouting every couple of minutes, so we paralleled them for awhile. Both Mom and her calf had a lot of white markings on the tops of their pectoral flippers, making them very recognizable. Later in the trip we found a competitive pod of 3 Humpbacks. We saw a huge peduncle throw followed by lots of pec slaps for almost 15 minutes, before they all disappeared underwater. After watching a lot of nothing and waiting for something — anything — to happen, our onboard naturalist Maika predicted the future, suggesting that one of our competitive Humpbacks was going to breach. Moments later, one of them did breach (Maika is still proud about that prediction). When we deployed the hydrophone during this cruise, we were able to eavesdrop on some fairly close Humpback vocalizations.
Mahalo,
Claire
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: For a long time, researchers studying the ever-evolving songs of the Humpbacks have thought that the whales teach each other the new phrases and versions of their song, and that’s why all the Humpbacks in close proximity are singing basically the same song. Well, turns out that might not be correct. Research published in 2021 by University of Buffalo’s Dr. Eduardo Mercado, suggests that “neither cultural transmission nor social learning contributes significantly to how humpback whales change their songs over time”. He analyzed songs of Humpbacks who aren’t in acoustic contact with each other, yet still produced acoustically comparable songs. Though he’s not entirely sure how this happens, he suggests that the whales use “rules” to make the changes based on proceeding sounds or rhythms, and that even though the various populations don’t have genetic or social links, they all share the same rules. What do you think?