Diving, Spouting, and Tail Lobs

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.

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