Hear What We Heard – Humpbacks Sing

Aloha,

On Thursday’s Wake up with the Whales, we dropped the hydrophone and heard all sorts of interesting and different sounds and phrases…check it out here. But we also got to see a lot. Throughout the course of the cruise, we must have seen 30 different humpbacks including 4 different Mom/Baby/Escort pods and a couple of competitive pods. We got to watch two double breaches just 400 yards from the boat, and saw more single breaches than we could count a bit further away in different directions. We also got to see a couple of big adult Humpbacks tail lobbing and then slamming into each other at the surface.On the 10:00 Cruise from Kawaihae, we found a Mom/Baby/Escort right outside of the harbor. Baby had energy to burn and breached multiple, multiple times, while Mom came right up to the boat to take a look at us. On our Whales & Cocktails Cruise, we paralleled a competitive pod of 7 Humpbacks, staying with them for about 40 minutes. We saw lots of head lunges, peduncle throws and heard lots of trumpeting. We also saw three separate Mom/Baby/Escort pods, and watched a whole lot of tail lobbing going on from some other big adult humpbacks.
Mahalo and have a great weekend. I’ll send a recap of our weekend whale watches out on Monday.
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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