Tag Archives: Humpback song

Radical New Music Courtesy of Humpbacks

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Aloha,

Our March 30th Whale Watch Cruises were really spectacular. On our 8:00 Wake Up with the Whales Cruise, we saw 8 different humpbacks within about 1000 yards of us. But while we were sitting, watching them in all directions, we heard sounds echoing up through the hulls, There was a singer very close by — so close we didn’t even need to deploy our hydrophone to hear him. But of course once we listened without the hydrophone, we wanted to hear the sounds even more clearly, so we dropped our microphone and this is what we heard: CLICK HERE. Very unique sounds…more like an aviary than a whale…While we were listening, two very big mature whales surfaced right next to the boat and swam around us — not once, but twice!
On our 10:00 Signature Whale Watch on Alala, as soon as we left the harbor, we saw some splashes to the south. So we took a turn to the left and found a pod of Spinner Dolphins. This pod was moving south fairly quickly and directly. They didn’t come to the boat, but we all saw lots of jumps and spins from this very active pod. After watching them for awhile, we saw the tell-tale spouts of Humpbacks, so we headed back north to what we thought was a pod of Mom and baby. Eventually, we figured out there were three whales in the pod when the escort surfaced too. As we watched, baby cycled between periods of activity and periods of quiet. While he was active we saw lots of tail lobs and little peduncle throws…and then he would tire out and dive down to mom. We got to see the flukes from all three of these whales — Mom and the Escort had strikingly white flukes, and baby had a definite black border around the white on his flukes. We finally had to turn back and head towards the harbor…that’s when baby started breaching and breaching and breaching.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: To our untrained ears, the sounds we hear from our hydrophones sound pretty random though we have noticed the lack of certain phrases this year that we heard fairly often last year. According to a paper published in the journal Current Biology, it turns out that our ears aren’t so untrained after all. Researchers have documented that the Humpback songs in the South Pacific are actually changing really quickly. Over the last decade, completely new song themes are appearing within a season. The researchers compared the radical evolution of the Humpbacks’ songs to human musical composition, suggesting that the themes are so novel; it’s as if whole new human musical genres were appearing that no one had ever heard just a few years ago — similar to the emergence of rockabilly in the 1950’s or hip hop in the 1970’s.

Mottled Whale

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Aloha,

On Monday’s Wake up With the Whales Cruise, we spent a lot of time with a Mom/Baby/Escort pod. Baby breached right next to the boat, catching all of us off guard.

Spy Hops

Mahalo to guest Sharon Van Dyke for this photo!

We also saw a lot of other spouts and tails from cruising adult Humpbacks. And we weren’t even out of the harbor on our 10:00 Signature Whale Watch when a guest yelled “Dolphins! Twelve o’Clock!” We soon found ourselves surrounded by a pod of 100+  very active Spinner Dolphins. We saw lots of babies jumping and spinning along with the adults, and as usual with a pod of Spinners, a bunch of them took turns playing in our bow wake. After watching them for awhile, we turned south towards a couple of Humpback spouts, but before we could go even 200 yards, a sub-adult Humpback surfaced right next to us. This guy was only about 25 feet long and had mottled skin (covered in white spots). We thought we saw the last of him when he took a dive…but he decided to stay with us, paralleling us for more than 40 minutes — always surfacing on our port side, taking 3 breaths and diving again. After watching him for awhile (and trying to determine why his skin was spotted), we stopped to deploy our hydrophone and got to listen to some very clear songs. Finally, on our way in again, we saw spouts and dives from 4 more pods of adult Humpbacks — two pods of two and two pods of 4. And on the Whales and Cocktails Cruise, we spent the first 45 minutes or so with a competitive pod of 5 whales that were heading north. We saw lots of lunging and heard lots of trumpeting from them. Then, we turned back and spent the rest of the time bouncing between different Mom/baby/escort pods. There sure are a lot of humpbacks around this season!

Mahalo,
Claire
P.S. I’ll be away from a computer this evening, and tomorrow morning..so I won’t be able to send out the report about Tuesday’s activities till later in the day on Wednesday.
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: The first whales to leave Hawaii each year are mature females (who are either newly pregnant, or taking a year off), followed by sub adult whales, and then, mature males. The last to leave are new mothers with their calves.

Bigger Equals Tougher

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Aloha,

It was a calm day on the water on Thursday, and the whales seemed to be enjoying the peaceful seas after Wednesday’s wild winds. Guests aboard our Wake up With the Whales on Seasmoke got to see a LOT of whales. In fact, towards the end of the cruise, I asked everyone how many different whales they thought we actually saw, and all we could agree on was that it was a “bunch”! Most of the whales were just surfacing and breathing before diving again, but we did get to watch the formation of a competitive pod. At first we were just watching 3 humpbacks swimming together, but when a fourth whale joined the pod, the action got a little more intense. They all started swimming much faster, and at one point, one of them lifted his head out of the water and we could clearly see that he was inflating his mouth (for a Humpback, “bigger” equals “tougher”). We also saw several breaches and tail lobs a bit further away.
At 11:00, we took two school groups out for a Whale Watch on Seasmoke — about half of them were 4th graders from Kona Pacific Public Charter School with a few of their teachers and parents, and the other half were visiting 9h graders from a private school in Connecticut. The kids asked some great questions, and  got to view some great action too. We spent a good amount of time watching a Mom/Baby/Escort pod. The escort was substantially bigger than Mom (probably older). For quite a long time, the baby alternated between lying on Mom’s head, and diving down below her (nursing maybe?). We also heard some great sounds when we deployed the hydrophone — lots of submerged singers fairly close by. We saw some breaching, pec slapping and tail lobbing from other adult humpbacks in the distance.
Alala also ran two morning cruises and the boat was “mugged” both times by the SAME Mom/Baby/Escort pod who spent considerable time right under and on the surface – right next to the boat – and below the boat! Fantastic!
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Research suggests that most Humpbacks who come to Hawaii don’t’ spend the entire winter with us. An average stay lasts between a month and 6 weeks. Possible exceptions to this rule include dominant males, who may spend more time here to optimize mating opportunities, and females who give birth after arriving in Hawaii. They might spend a little longer here so that their calves can grow large enough to successfully swim back to Alaska.

Mugged by Two Adults

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Aloha,

Tuesday was another 9 Whale Watch Cruise day for us. Highlights included watching a competitive pod of 5 whales from the Alala from 8:15 till 9:45. We found this pod off of Spencer Beach, and paralleled them as they swam north. We saw lots of head lunges, and lots of jaw claps. We also saw 6 pectoral slaps from the whale in the front of the pack, and lots of head butting from the whales behind. At one point, we saw the lead whale peduncle throw on top of one of the followers. And when we stopped the boat and deployed the hydrophone, the sounds we heard were so loud they almost shook the boat. On the next cruise, the competitive pod was no where to be found, but we did see lots of pods of two…and one pod of two came to see us for more than 20 minutes, surfacing right next to us, and diving right underneath us. Guests aboard Seasmoke and Manu Iwa departing from Anaeho’omalu Bay also got some great sightings with a couple of close encounters. Each cruise reports seeing 15 – 20 different whales, most in pods of two, but there were several competitive pods of 5 and 6 whales too.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Humpbacks produce sounds in frequencies ranging from 10 hz to 24 khz. A healthy young adult human can generally hear sounds in frequencies between the ranges of 20 hz to 20 khz.

Hear What We Heard – Humpbacks Sing

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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.

Delicious, Nutritious Humpback Whale Milk

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Aloha,

We started out our Wednesday with some excellent sightings on both Manu Iwa and Seasmoke for our Wake Up with the Whales Cruise. On Manu Iwa, we saw more than 20 Humpbacks within a mile from us, but many of them were much closer. We got to see a Mom and her baby unaccompanied by an escort. Baby breached a few times (probably burning off some of the energy he gains from drinking all that milk). We also saw a few HUGE (45 foot plus) whales — one of whom surfaced within 20 feet of us while we were idling with the hydrophone in the water. And speaking of the hydrophone — we heard a whole symphony when we deployed it today. While all this was going on, we also saw peduncle throws, and lots of pectoral slaps. Since Seasmoke departed at the same time from the same location, we decided to look for our “own” whales, and boy, did we find them! We watched a calf and his Mom for awhile, before another whale surfaced less than 100 feet from us. We actually didn’t know which way to look for a lot of the charter since there were whales everywhere! We saw lots of pec slaps, breaches, and peduncle throws, and also heard some pretty clear singing when we deployed our hydrophone.
On our 10:00 Cruise from Kawaihae, we found a Mom/Calf pod just north of the harbor. We watched them for awhile and got to see baby breach before we headed off to watch some of the other bigger whales we were seeing out a bit further. We came across a competitive pod of 5 whales who were doing their usual competitive aggressive behaviors — head lunging, peduncle throwing, and bubble blowing. At one point, they all passed within about 50 feet of our idling boat. On the way back to the harbor, we found our Mom and baby again. We stopped to watch baby breach 8 more times…but had to head back to the dock. As we left (which it was just killing us to do, but we had to get back), we watched baby continuing to breach over and over and over again.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Being mammals, Humpback Moms feed their calves milk. But Humpback milk isn’t just any old milk — it’s extremely rich with a fat content of approximately 50%! Human milk contains only about 4.5% fat. Supposedly, Humpback milk tastes like “sweetened cod liver oil” …but I don’t know that from experience!

Not a Fluke at All

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Aloha,

Guests on Monday’s Signature Whale Watch got to see 7 different Humpbacks. We spent most of our time with a pod of two adults about 2 miles off Spencer Beach Park. These whales were surfacing and spouting 3 or 4 times before disappearing from our sight for 8 minute dives. One of the pod showed his flukes on each dive, but the other just sort of sank below the surface and then reappeared next to the fluke-diver each time. When we deployed our hydrophone, we all got to hear some pretty clear singing. We estimated the singer was about 3 or 4 miles away from us. And towards the end of our cruise some of us even got to see a breach (the rest of us got to see the splash from the breach).
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: On today’s Whale Watch we saw one whale’s flukes so often that we started thinking about the etymology of the word “fluke”. We know that the triangular blade of an anchor is called a fluke, and since a whale’s tail sort of resembles an anchor, that made sense. But why would we call a weird occurrence a “fluke”? So I looked it up…”Fluke” comes from the German word “flugel” which means wing (that makes sense, because a whale’s tail looks a little like a wing). The phrase “just a fluke” is of unknown origin, but it was first used to describe a lucky shot in billiards. Since there’s a fish also called a “fluke” — it’s a flounder — the phrase might have come about as a pun on “floundering” In other words, if you “make a fluke”, you’re just floundering, and your success is merely due to luck.

Grunts and Groans from Below

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Aloha,

On Wednesday we took guests out on our Signature 10:00 Whale Watch from Kawaihae Harbor on the Alala. We enjoyed beautiful ocean conditions…calm winds, and that unique Hawaiian combo of getting to feel a light rain while cruising under sunny skies.
We didn’t see any Humpbacks, but while we were offshore of Pu’u Kohola (near Spencer Beach Park), we had an opportunity to deploy our hydrophone. We didn’t hear singing…but we could hear some faint “grunts and groans” that definitely were not sounds made by the boat (we could hear those sounds too). Near the shoreline, our microphone is able to pick up sounds from as far as 5 miles, so we know there are whales in the vicinity. At the end of our cruise, while we were just outside of the harbor, one of our guests saw a Humpback’s peduncle (that’s what we call the part from just behind the dorsal fin to the tail). We all got pretty excited, but in the remaining time we had left, this whale chose not to surface again. We had to call this cruise a “fluke”…but we weren’t too disappointed. Since the cruise is guaranteed, we’ve invited everyone to join us again on another Whale Watch Cruise for FREE!
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Whale Fact of the Day: The first whales to arrive in Hawaii each year from Alaska are females with a yearling, followed by sub-adults (the teenagers of the whale world). The next to arrive are mature resting females (ovaries and mammary glands show no signs of recent activity) followed by mature males, and finally late pregnancy stage females.

Humpbacks Can Sleep – But How?

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Aloha,
Between our regularly scheduled cruises, our kid’s field trip cruises, and some private cruises, we ran 5 different Whale Watch Tours yesterday — with all those cruises, there are just too many details to send in an email. Suffice it to say, the majority of the pods we saw throughout the day were Mom/Baby/Escort pods. We did get to watch some pretty wild surface action on a couple of our trips, with competitive pods charging around the Mom/Baby duo. We saw tail lobs, peduncle throws, a couple of breaches and lots of spouts and dorsal fins too. We deployed our hydrophones several times throughout the day with mixed results. We were always able to hear the underwater chorus the whales listen to all day, but only a few times did we hear very loud singing (indicating close-by males). Based on what we were watching on the surface, the males close by to us were way too busy to stop and sing!
Have a great weekend,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day:Humpback Whales don’t sleep as soundly as we do — if they did, researchers believe that they’d drown. Humans breathe in response to carbon dioxide build-up in our blood, but Humpbacks and other marine mammals have to keep part of their brain awake at all times so they remember to breathe. When a Humpback sleeps, he floats just under the surface of the ocean, and comes up to breathe every couple of minutes. We call this behavior “logging’ as the whale looks a lot like a floating log.

What do Warthogs have in Common with Humpbacks?

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Aloha,
We experienced some pretty breezy conditions on Monday, so we only were able to operate our two morning Whale Watch Cruises. Our naturalists are still reporting lots of spouts, but we’ve been noticing that the migration back to Alaska is in full swing. Generally the whales we see later in the season are pods of Mom/Baby/Escort, and lots of lone whales (who researchers are now identifying as alpha males that are optimizing mating opportunities before migrating north). We’re also seeing lots of competitive pods associating and disassociating as they battle to establish dominance among themselves. When we are able to deploy our hydrophone, we’re hearing a lot of singers too. We’ve always maintained that though it’s sad to say Aloha to our Humpbacks, the last three weeks of every season does bring some exciting surface action. Combine cute curious calves with an uneven ratio of males to females, and add in some desperate-to-mate male Humpbacks, and we get the recipe for incredible whale watches!
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Starting out as a way to pass time between whale sightings and hunts on the whaling ships in the mid18th century, “scrimshawing” (or the art of carving intricate designs on to whale teeth, bones and baleen) survived until the ban on commercial whaling went into effect. The etched designs were originally produced by sailors using sailing needles, and were colored with candle soot and tobacco juice to bring the designs into view. Today, hobbyists still create scrimshaw — but they use bones and tusks from non-endangered and non-protected animal species like camels, buffalo and even warthogs.