Whales and Dolphins Interact

Aloha,
On Tuesday’s Breakfast with the Whales we saw a LOT of breaching and most of it was within 100 yards! Of course we always stop our approach when we’re more than 100 yards away, but if the whales choose to come to us…Anyway, we also got to watch some pectoral slaps (which are really amazing to see, because a full-grown humpback has a 15 foot long pectoral fin (arm)). As we were watching all those whales breaching, a pod of Spinner Dolphins got involved in the action – and it appeared to us that the breaching Humpbacks were landing on top of the dolphins! Undoubtedly, that was more fun for us to watch than it was for the dolphins… On the 10:00 Trip, things quieted down a bit, but we still got a few close encounters and saw multiple breaches. On each trip, we deployed the hydrophone, but the sounds we heard were pretty faint. And on each trip we were able to see spouts and flukes from at least 15 different whales.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day:When we see a Humpback wave his pectoral fin, it looks really floppy — as if there were no bones inside it at all. But if you were to x-ray that fin, surprisingly, you’d find all the same bones and joints that we have in our arms — all the way down to the smallest digits of our fingers. Though according to researcher Spencer Wilkie Tinker, Humpbacks are missing what would be the third finger on a human.

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