Zoomies

Aloha,

Both the weather and the Humpbacks were calm during Tuesday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise from Kawaihae Harbor. Sure, we did get to see 3 separate breaches from lone whales who were quite a distance apart from each other offshore of the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, but we spent most of our cruise watching other whales surfacing, spouting and sounding.

Guests on our 10:30 Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise met a Mom and her little calf at the exit to the harbor. The calf was getting his “zoomies” out and was swimming all over the place at the surface. Momma let him approach the boat (under her close supervision) allowing us some good views of their tubercles (those are what we call the bumps on their faces — see today’s Fact of the Day and today’s photo for more about that). After we watched these two for awhile, we saw some spouts from a couple of bigger whales out to our west, but by the time we got to where we thought they had been, they surfaced quite a bit further out to sea…and we didn’t have time to investigate, so we headed back towards the harbor and watched our Momma and calf for awhile longer before calling it a (successful) day.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: All mammals have hair. Humpback Whales are mammals… so where is their hair? Humpbacks have rows of bumps on their chins that we call “tubercles”. Out of each one, sticks a hair that’s about 1/2 inch long that we call a “vibrissa”. Because there’s a nerve ending underneath each hair, and blood flow to the nerve, we know the whales use these hairs to sense something…but we’re not sure what they’re sensing. Quite likely, they use their hairs like cats use their whiskers – for proprioception…or perhaps these hairs work in a coordinated fashion with sensory organs in their chins helping the whales to know when to open and close their mouths around schools of prey.