Aloha,

We ran 4 Whale Watch Cruises on Tuesday, and to quote Captain Patrick (who was on Alala from Kawaihae all day), “there were LOTS of whales all around”. We saw multiple Mom/Baby/Escort pods, multiple unescorted Mom/Baby pods, multiple competitive pods, and even a couple of lone whales. On days like Tuesday, it’s difficult to keep accurate counts of the number of surface displays we saw, so instead of reporting them, we’ll just have to say we saw a little of everything throughout the day, including breaches, tail lobs, head lunges, and peduncle throws. When the whales approached us, we were able to see some interesting scarring on some of their bodies, and when we got lucky enough to see close-up fluke dives, we could actually see the barnacles living on the edges of the whales tails. We did deploy our onboard hydrophones throughout the day, and we got to listen in to all the singing and vocalizations going on underwater too.

Mahalo,

Claire

Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: The barnacles called “Coronula diadema” live only on Humpback Whales, and they seem to prefer to live on areas of the whale where the water flow is consistent (chin and fins). Though researchers aren’t sure how the barnacle can even find a whale to live on, there is some speculation that because the barnacles are spawning during the winter in Hawaii, the whales here are swimming in “barnacle larvae soup”. When a whale swims by, those “baby” barnacles chemically sense it, and hop on where ever they can. They use their antennae as “feet’ and walk around the whale till they find a suitable spot (which can take quite a while… if the barnacle were the size of a person, the whale would be 20 miles long). Once they find a spot they like, they flip over and produce tube-shaped cavities in their shells that actually draw in prongs of growing whale skin, holding their position on the whale for life.