Unfriendly Females?

Aloha,

Our Monday Morning Whale Watch Cruises were scheduled on Seasmoke departing from Anaeho’omalu Bay. Guests on our Wake up with the Whales Cruise were surrounded by surfacing and spouting whales. No matter which direction we looked, there was someone popping up for a breath or two. We spent most of our time watching a Mom/Calf/Escort pod. The calf did some cute little pectoral waves and even a few slaps when he was just about 50 yards from us. We also got to see a couple of breaches from whales further away.

On our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise, we got to watch two different Mom/calf pods — though the pods weren’t interacting with each other. Almost all of us got to see a couple of breaches from whales who were about 400 yards from us. We also had a whale floating about 50 feet below us. Our naturalist Dave, and Captain Will announced to everyone onboard that the whale was there — but no one believed them until the whale decided to surface right at our stern!

When we deployed our hydrophone on both trips, we heard a LOT of whales’ voices so there was definitely some communing going on underwater too.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Researchers have observed that female Humpbacks don’t associate with each other at all while they’re in Hawaii. This is especially interesting in light of the fact that the females do associate with each other in Alaska — they’ll even feed cooperatively there. Since the females come here just to mate (and calve), we can postulate that female-female interaction must somehow get in the way of successful mating. Maybe groups of females would attract too many competitive males for safe mating to occur….what do you think?