Aloha,
On Thursday’s Breakfast with the Whales, guests saw lots of whales surfacing, breathing and diving. It seemed like no matter which direction we looked, a whale was up. We also saw 4 breaches close to the boat and had a couple of nice close encounters with curious Humpbacks. Our Whales and Cocktails Cruise started off kind of slow, with lots of “blows and goes”, but then we found a Mom and her baby who wanted to play with the boat. They came right up to us and both of them spy hopped twice, clearly taking a look at us. We then found a couple of other whales who seemed very interested in us whenever we had the boat in gear and were travelling parallel to them. As soon as we turned the engines off and went into stealth mode, these whales would dive…so we’d start up again, which would bring them to the surface. It might have been a coincidence…but it sure seemed like they wanted to travel along side a moving boat, and quickly got bored with a quiet one! We ended the evening seeing a couple of breaches a little further away, and some HUGE peduncle throws close by.
Mahalo, and have a great weekend. I’ll send the next report out on Monday.
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Whale Fact of the Day: Researchers studying the totally geographically isolated Arabian Sea Humpbacks have recently noted that these Humpbacks sing songs that are a whole level less complex than the songs Humpbacks in every other ocean of the world sing. Arabian Humpback songs are comprised of notes, making phrases, that are repeated in the same order, while other Humpbacks group the phrases into themes and the repeated themes comprise the song.
If I’m interpreting this correctly, the Arabian Humpbacks’ version of say “Old McDonald Had a Farm” would feature only one farm animal, and they’d be singing about that one animal over and over and over. Humpbacks elsewhere would be able to use the structured verse to sing about lots of different animals on the farm…If there are any music theorists out there please help me out. Here’s a link to a story about the research….http://www.bbc.co.