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What’s the Point?

Humpback Dorsal

Aloha,

People ask us all the time whether we see more Humpbacks during our 8AM Cruise or during our 10:30 Cruise. To be completely honest, sighting frequency varies by the day — and if we really saw more whales consistently on one cruise or the other, we’d only offer the better of the two cruises!

On Thursday, we definitely saw fewer Humpbacks during our Wake Up with the Whales Cruise. Guests on this cruise did get to see several spouts, and several dorsal fins, and several flukes from sounding whales all around us, but all the whales we saw were very calm and not really interacting with each other much at the surface.

Our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise was a completely different experience. As soon as we left the bay, we saw spouts from nearby Humpbacks, and quickly hooked up with a competitive pod of 5 adult whales who were heading south. We were able to parallel them for most of the cruise, and got to see lots of shoving at the surface from the 4 trailing whales. We’re pretty sure the Humpback leading the group was female and she was doing her best to shake those 4 males (or maybe she was doing her best to enchant them — we really don’t know if the purpose of a competitive pod is for the males to overwhelm a female or for the female to determine who’s the most attractive male – see today’s Fact of the Day for more on this). While we were watching this group, there were other Humpbacks nearby who breached a couple of times. We weren’t sure if they were attempting to communicate something to our competitive pod (for instance, their location or intentions) but during the time we were able to watch, none of them joined “our” pod.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Biopsy samples taken from South Pacific Humpbacks show a ratio of 2.4 males for every female on the breeding grounds. A similar ratio has been observed in Hawaii. This suggests either: 1) female Humpbacks can afford to be choosy with their mating partner, or: 2) female Humpbacks are overwhelmed by aggressive males and bullied into mating.

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