Tag Archives: mom/baby pod

Great Weather to Whale Watch

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Aloha,

We had a lot of fun on our Tuesday Whale Watch Cruises. The weather was great, and we ran too many cruises to tell you what we saw on each…but suffice it to say, there was a lot of action. Pods of Mom and baby seemed to gravitate towards our idling boats all day. We all saw competitive pods charging around on the surface. As usual with a competitive pod, there was lots of head lunging and throat inflation to see, and lots of trumpeting to hear. When we deployed our hydrophone throughout the day, we got to enjoy a veritable symphony of whale songs. Most of the whales we were listening to were not extremely close, but once in awhile we were able to pick out a singer nearby. We did see breaching, tail lobbing, and peduncle throws throughout the day from both adult humpbacks and calves.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback 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, which 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.

Deeper Swims and Whales in Space

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Aloha,
We’ve always wondered if the behaviors of the Humpbacks would be affected by events occurring across the ocean….so we were curious if the April 1st earthquake in Chile which spawned a very small tidal surge in this part of the Pacific would noticeably alter what we see the whales doing. On the cruises we ran today, we didn’t really see much difference in Humpback behavior. The Moms and calves we saw were all pretty mellow. If anything, the whales were further from shore today than they were the two days previous. But with the population of Humpbacks around Hawaii decreasing as the season ends, it’s really impossible for us to say if the ocean surge did encourage a deeper swim, or if it was just a coincidence. We did see a lot of flukes today, and also a lot of dorsal fins, but not many splashes at all. Our near-shore population seems more and more skewed to the Mom/Baby/Escort pods.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day:The haunting song of the Humpback has actually travelled beyond our oceans. In 1977, NASA launched two Voyager space crafts. Aboard each was a golden record with a collection of sights, sounds and greetings from Earth in 54 different human languages. These records also include greetings from Humpback whales! And that was just the first time the whales’ song travelled beyond our planet…On Earth Day (4/22) in 2005, a private organization called Deep Space Network broadcast a live feed from a hydrophone off the coast of Maui of the Humpbacks singing. They used a five meter parabolic dish antenna and broadcast the sounds about 18 trillion miles into deep space. So far, we haven’t gotten a response back…

Mugged by a Baby

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Aloha,
Our weekend started out, to quote Captain Will, as “CRAZY”. On Friday’s Breakfast with the Whales, we cruised out of the bay and just outside the Hilton we saw a Mom and calf surface about 150 yards from us so we shut down the motors and just drifted. We looked, and looked, and then all of a sudden they both popped up right next to the boat. They swam under us and around us for more than 40 minutes. Every once in awhile, the calf would stop looking at us to breach right next to us! A couple of kayakers paddled by, and the whales left us, and swam right under them (which must have been a pretty intense experience for those people in their little boats), only to return to us for some more viewing. After these whales got enough of us and headed off, we saw another pod of two adult whales tail slapping near Honoko’opae Bay. We also two breaches from some other adult Humpbacks about 800 yards from us.
On Sunday’s Breakfast with the Whales, we got to see a couple of different pods of whales, but the highlight of the trip was watching a full breach just 30 feet (not yards — FEET) off the boat. We also saw flukes and spouts from lots of other Humpbacks cruising the coastline.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Most Humpbacks are “right-handed”. Researchers looking at abrasions on Humpbacks’ jaws found more abrasions on the right jaw than on the left, and observed more “flippering” with the right flipper than with the left, suggesting a definite right-side preference among the Humpback population.

A Lot to Hear

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Aloha,
Guests aboard Monday’s Breakfast with the Whales Cruise got some close up views of a couple different Mom/Baby pods when the little calves decided to get some close-up views of us! There was a lot of breaching and splashing to be seen too, but the surface-active whales stayed on the horizon. Right before we returned to the bay, we got an opportunity to deploy our hydrophone, and what we heard sounded like a symphony. There must have been two or three singers fairly close to us, but the in the background we could hear some really complex sounds, indicating a lot of activity within the range of the microphone. And consider this – even though our microphone picks up sounds from at least 5 miles away, researchers believe that whales can hear sounds from much further. So what we hear is just a fraction of what they hear…whales live in a noisy world rich with singing and vocalizing (for us, perhaps akin to living an entire life inside Aloha Stadium during the Pro Bowl).
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.