Aloha,

On yesterday’s Whales and Cocktails, guests saw two different Humpbacks – both adults (or sub-adults). We saw the spout from one of them…and the other breached. The breach was in the distance though, so we saw the splash better than we saw the whale! Since one of the theories about why Humpbacks breach is to communicate their location to other whales by creating that big splash, we figured that either the whale knew we were here and wanted us to know where he was, or that there were more whales in the vicinity that we didn’t see!

Mahalo,

Claire

Captain Claire’s Humpback Whale Fact of the Day: There are Humpback Whale populations in all the oceans of the world. The whales we see here each winter are part of the North Pacific population. “Our” whales feed in the waters of the Gulf of Alaska during the summer months. They swim the 3500 miles to Hawaii each year to calve in warm waters and to mate. Recent research suggests that “our” humpbacks are actually part of a distinct genetic population, and that there are a total of 5 distinct North Pacific Humpback populations. I’ll tell you more about that in a future email.