Well That was an Understatement

Aloha,

According to our onboard naturalist Nolan, Monday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise was quite “eventful”, and after you read about what we saw in just 90 minutes, we think you’ll agree that his description is a bit of an understatement. Just south of Anaeho’omalu Bay, we watched a sub-adult Humpback breach half a dozen times just about 50 yards from us. After he finished breaching, he started pec slapping and then rolling around on the surface. While that was going on, there were eight (that’s right, EIGHT) Humpbacks surrounding us, spouting and sounding. On our way back into the bay, a lone whale surfaced about 30 yards from our stern, surprising all of us. We also got to see at least 30 different fluke’s up dives including multiple dives where two whales lifted their flukes in unison.

As we left the bay for our 10:30 Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise we saw multiple breaches from a lone whale, but by the time we got to that magical 100 yard mark, our breacher had vanished. That was ok though because we came across a competitive pod of 6 whales. This pod was obviously interacting — we saw some rolls at the surface and a few tail lobs, but they were a pretty subdued group of Humpbacks (at least while we watched). We also got to see two different Mom/calf pods and we could tell that the calf in the second pod was definitely resting on top of Momma for awhile. When we deployed the hydrophone during this trip, we heard quite a bit — lots of whale voices — so we knew there were a lot of other Humpbacks close-by who were choosing not to surface.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Generally, the longer a mammal lives, the more likely it is to develop chronic diseases like cancer. Since Humpbacks and many other baleen whales have lifespans equivalent to ours, when you think of it, it’s kind of amazing that they don’t get cancer. A couple of years ago researchers investigating this anomaly came up with a possible reason why we don’t see cancerous tumors in big baleen whales. It turns out that cetaceans have many more Tumor Suppressing Genes than humans, and that the turnover rate for these genes is 2.4 times faster than it is in other mammals (in other words, their genes continually “fight” tumor formation). As an aside, the researchers also found that mutations in the genes that are biomarkers for some common human cancers are also correlated with hair loss…and a lack of body hair is certainly noticeable among cetaceans. Interested in learning more? Click here to read the published research article.