Monthly Archives: February 2014

Long Distance Humpback Swimming

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Aloha, We ran 5 different Whale Watch Cruises on Thursday. Highlights included a very active pod of 3 on our 10:00 Whale Watch – mom, her baby, and an escort. The escort did multiple pec slaps, allowing us to really get an idea how big that pectoral fin actually is. Baby did his best to keep up with the adults as they moved pretty quickly down the coast. On the Private afternoon Whale Watch, we saw lots of different Humpbacks. They were mostly moving down the coast line, so we saw lots of spouts and lots of flukes. And on our Whales and Cocktails Cruise, the whales were pretty mellow. We saw lots of dorsal fins from the surfacing whales, allowing us a good view of the variation in size and shape of those fins. We also saw a lot of flukes as the whales began their longer deeper dives. When we deployed the hydrophone on this trip, we were able to hear many different voices, but none of the singers’ voices was distinct, leading us to believe that a lot of the activity was occurring further off shore. Mahalo and have a great weekend, Claire

Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: In Sept. 2013, Dianne Nyad completed a record breaking 110 mile swim from Cuba to Florida – but in the Humpback world, that’s nothing. Migration between Alaska and Hawaii is around 3500 miles. But Humpbacks can swim even further than that. In 2001, a Norwegian tourist snapped a photo of a female Humpback in breeding grounds off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. When he found the photo again in 2010 and posted it, researchers were able to match the flukes to a photo they had taken of the SAME whale in breeding grounds off the coast of Brazil — which means she had swum more than 6000 miles! Researchers aren’t sure what motivated the whale to swim across the Atlantic– until this whale was identified in both places, it was assumed that Humpbacks only travelled across latitudes, not longitudes. Which just goes to show you…we still have a LOT to learn.

Spy Hopping Calf and Bubble Blowing Adults

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Aloha,
On Wednesday’s Breakfast with the Whales Cruise, we got to see a baby whale playing around on the surface, rolling over, showing us his pec fins and spy hopping with his little mouth open. We also saw a competitive pod doing multiple “head stands” and tail lobs. On our 12:30 Whale Watch, we were accompanied most of the trip by a Mom/Baby/Escort pod who all surfaced near us multiple times and even accompanied us back to the bay. Then the wind came up — so it was a bit bumpy on our Whales and Cocktails Cruise, but that didn’t stop us from having a fantastic Whale Watch. We took our time getting out of the bay, and finally came across a pod of Humpbacks who apparently decided it might be interesting to dive below our boat and blow some bubbles. Even with the late afternoon glare on the water, it was still possible see to these whales as they floated and swam below the surface. But the highlight of the trip had to have been when these whales surfaced right next to us, “mugging” us. As usual when it’s windy, we also saw lots of splashes from surface active whales a bit further away. We even saw a few tail lobs and pectoral slaps.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: A distinguishing morphological (body) characteristic of the Humpback is the length of her pectoral fins. Their average length is 1/3rd the length of the Humpback’s body (approx. 15 feet). The species name for the Humpback (Megaptera) describes the fin – the translation from Latin for Megaptera is “Big – Winged”).

Breaching at Sunset

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Aloha,
On Tuesday’s Breakfast with the Whales, we saw flukes and  spouts everywhere we looked. We finished the trip with a great close encounter with a Humpback who decided to swing by our boat and check us out. The word of the evening though was “BREACH”! On our Moku Nui Sunset Sail we saw multiple breaches right in front of the boat. We also got to watch a Mom/Baby pod cruise along side us, and we saw a competitive pod charging across the surface. This pod was really bullying each other with lots of peduncle throws, head lunges, and shoving.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: How do Humpbacks keep their cool when swimming through our warm Hawaiian waters?  During prolonged exercise in warm water, excess heat is shed by increasing circulation to a network of capillaries (in Latin they’re called “retia mirabiliia” which translates to “miracle network”) near the surface of the Humpbacks’ flippers, flukes and dorsal fin — the excess heat is shed to the external environment. In fact, many researchers believe that whales lifting their pectoral fins into the air, or resting with their flukes exposed vertically are actually trying to cool off.

A Lot to Hear

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Aloha,
Guests aboard Monday’s Breakfast with the Whales Cruise got some close up views of a couple different Mom/Baby pods when the little calves decided to get some close-up views of us! There was a lot of breaching and splashing to be seen too, but the surface-active whales stayed on the horizon. Right before we returned to the bay, we got an opportunity to deploy our hydrophone, and what we heard sounded like a symphony. There must have been two or three singers fairly close to us, but the in the background we could hear some really complex sounds, indicating a lot of activity within the range of the microphone. And consider this – even though our microphone picks up sounds from at least 5 miles away, researchers believe that whales can hear sounds from much further. So what we hear is just a fraction of what they hear…whales live in a noisy world rich with singing and vocalizing (for us, perhaps akin to living an entire life inside Aloha Stadium during the Pro Bowl).
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day:To our untrained ears, the sounds we hear from our hydrophones sound pretty random, though we have noticed the lack of certain phrases this year that we heard fairly often last year. According to a paper published in the journal Current Biology, it turns out that our ears aren’t so untrained after all. Researchers have documented that the Humpback songs in the South Pacific are actually changing really quickly. Over the last decade, completely new song themes are appearing within a season. The researchers compared the radical evolution of the Humpbacks’ songs to human musical composition, suggesting that the themes are so novel; it’s as if whole new human musical genres were appearing that no one had ever heard just a few years ago.

Diving, Spouting, and Tail Lobs

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Aloha,

On Thursday, we ran two different Breakfast with the Whales Cruises from Anaeho’omalu using Seasmoke and Manu Iwa. Even though both of the boats left at roughly the same time and from the same location, guests on each got to see different activities.

On Manu Iwa’s Cruise, we got to watch lots of whales spouting. We saw a few breaches in the distance, but since the water was so calm we decided to stop the boat for awhile and deploy the hydrophone. We heard some very clear and very loud singing and vocalizing, so we knew there were a lot of whales underwater as well. We did get a close encounter on this cruise when a whale decided to surface about 20 yards from us. On Seasmoke’s Cruise, we spent considerable time with a whale our younger guests named “Flappy” due to his repetitive tail lobbing at close range. “Flappy” was part of a competitive pod who were all charging around on the surface nearby and breathing hard so we got to hear lots of trumpeting. As we made our way back to the bay, we got to see lots of other adult humpbacks as they surfaced, spouted, and dived (or “dove” – I looked it up and both of these past-tense forms of the word “dive” are correct) in every direction we looked. To top it off, we spent our last few minutes just outside the bay with a pod of Mom and her baby. Mom may have had an escort, but we weren’t able to stick around to see him surface.

Mahalo and have a great weekend!

Claire

Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: There’s a time when a whale is still in its fetal stage that it’s covered in fur. By the time the calf is born, the fur has disappeared. Many researchers believe that this is another indication that whales have evolved from an animal with a common ancestor to a hippo. The idea that the stages of an animal’s fetal development reflect evolutionary development or “Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny” was first proposed by Ernst Haeckel around 1900.

Female Humpbacks Communicate?

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Aloha,
On Wednesday’s Breakfast with the Whales Cruise, we got to watch about a dozen different Humpbacks. At first we were just watching a lot of spouting and fluke dives, but when Captain Will stopped the boat, a couple of very big whales surfaced right next to us – twice! Then, we were approached by a Mom with a very small calf (the calf’s dorsal fin hadn’t straightened up yet so we know he was young). After investigating us, they turned to swim away and the little guy did a half-breach. Our 10:00 Whale Watch began with a Mom and her baby coming over to see us. Right after that, we found a small competitive pod of 3 whales. These whales were really active on the surface, giving us a good view of tail lobs, head stands, and even a double spy-hop (making us wonder if the whales were looking at us or were more interested in how they looked to each other above the surface). We finally had to break away from all the action to head back to the harbor, but on the way back in we had whales surfacing 100 yards from us all around the boat. On the Whales and Cocktails Cruise, our onboard naturalist Mike reports seeing “plenty of whales”. He also reports hearing some great sounds from the hydrophone when it was deployed. But the most interesting part of the charter happened towards the end, when we were approached by two different Mom/Calf pods. The pods were about 20 feet apart, and both of them got very active – tail lobbing repetitively, causing us to question whether they were trying to communicate something urgent to each other or to us.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: We’ve never witnessed a Humpback taking care of two calves. We know she could conceive twins (and whalers occasionally would find twin fetuses) but we doubt she could carry twins to term. And even if she could, we really doubt she could produce the approximately 200 gallons of milk she’d need each day to feed two calves

Whales Everywhere on Tuesday Afternoon

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Aloha,
The rainy weather caused us to cancel our early morning Whale Watches on Tuesday, but as soon as we could go out again, what we saw more than made up for the first part of the day. In fact, on our Whales and Cocktails Cruise, we saw so many different spouts as we were leaving the bay that we weren’t sure which direction to head (one of our favorite dilemmas)! Captain Shane decided to take us south and we were rewarded quickly with a very curious calf and his permissive Mom. Much to our delight, she let him investigate the boat at close range. We then saw a competitive pod of 6 whales charging across the surface. There was lots of trumpeting from these hard-breathing whales. After that, we saw another pod of Mom/Baby, and this time an escort surfaced with them. For a grand finale, Mom breached twice, and the baby got into the excitement too, breaching multiple times.Our onboard naturalist Angelica estimates that throughout the duration of the cruise we saw 35 different whales!
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Researchers have observed that Humpback calves are very playful, investigating all kinds of objects in their environment (including our boat), interacting with their moms, and even interacting with passing pods of dolphins. But for as many calves as we see in Hawaii during the winter, we never have observed the calves playing with each other. Though we’re not sure why this is, perhaps Mom won’t allow a calf that isn’t hers to approach because she doesn’t want to feed the wrong one.

Size Matters – At least it does for female Humpbacks!

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Aloha,
We ran 3 Whale Watches yesterday under the cloudy skies. On the boat, we find it relaxing not to be in direct sunlight all day, and the whales seemed to agree with us. We saw lots of spouting and fluke dives (giving us some great shots of the unique white patterns on the ventral side of the whales’ tails). And as expected for mid-February Whale Watches, we saw lots of pods of Mom/Baby and almost all of these pods were accompanied by at least one escort. The Mom/Baby pods accompanied by more than one escort were moving much more quickly as the escorts jockeyed for the position closest to Mom. Yesterday was one of those days where no matter which direction we looked we could see spouts and splashes from surface active whales.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Whale Fact of the Day:Recent research documents that mature-sized female humpbacks associate almost exclusively with mature sized males, and have a significant preference for the largest of these males. Mature sized males, however, were less discriminating and would associate with all females regardless of size (though the males that associated with immature females were generally the smaller males). Finally, immature-sized males associate with immature-sized females. This “assortative paring” has rarely been documented in mammals – so why would whales use size as a determining factor for mate choice? Since males aren’t involved in taking care of their calves, and since research demonstrates that a bigger calf is much more likely to survive, size is much more important to a female Humpback. The sex differences in size preference by mature whales probably reflect the relatively high costs of mature females mating with small or immature males compared to the lower costs of mature males mating with small or immature females. Body size appears to influence the adoption of alternative mating tactics by males such that smaller mature males avoid the costs of competing for the highest-quality females and instead focus their attentions on smaller females that may or may not be mature.
And if it would help to sum all that up in layman’s terms….for female Humpbacks, size matters.

Mom and Baby Check us Out

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Aloha,
We ran lots of Whale Watches this weekend, so here are some of the highlights. On Friday’s Breakfast with the Whales, we were approached by three different Mom/Baby/Escort pods at different times. We also saw something that our on-board naturalist Mike had a difficult time describing. He said that just behind the boat, guests watched a whale do what looked like a “reverse spy-hop”. The whale came vertically up out of the water tail first, till almost half his body was above the surface and held that position for a three count. Mike offered to draw a diagram…but we think you get the idea without the picture!
On Saturday’s 10:00 Whale Watch, we got to see 3 breaches about 500 yards away from us and one just 100 yards away from us! Captain Will estimates we saw 25 different Humpbacks on this cruise, and lots of Mom/Baby/Escort pods.
On Sunday’s Breakfast with the Whales, we saw more than 25 different Humpbacks. Most of them seemed to be kind of tired – just surfacing to breath, but we did see a competitive pod in front of Mauna Lani who exchanged 10 breaches. Underwater, it must have been a different story, because when we deployed the hydrophone we heard a LOT of singing and vocalizing from quite a few whales. On the 10:00 Whale Watch, a Mom/Baby/Escort pod spent a lot of time with us. Baby was really small (and probably very young). We also saw an adult pec slap and tail lob very close by. And to top it all off, on our Sunday Whales and Cocktails, we spent considerable time with another Mom/Baby/Escort pod, but we also saw lots of peduncle throws and pec slaps from a pod of two adults nearby.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Being mammals, Humpbacks have belly buttons – in case you’re wondering, they’re “innies”.