Breaching in the Rain

Aloha,

We woke up to winter weather on Wednesday. Right before our Wake up With the Whales Cruise began, the clouds were ominous, but the storm hadn’t quite rolled in, so we boarded our guests and headed out to sea. Of course winter being what it is, we didn’t get very far before the rain came in and it felt like we were suddenly and magically in the Pacific Northwest instead of Hawaii. We were about to turn the boat back around and head in when two HUGE humpbacks started breaching just 200 feet from us, over and over and over again. Our guests decided to brave the rain, and we watched this incredible action for more than 30 minutes. Were the whales excited by the rain and wind? We’ll never know, but we did all agree that any discomfort we felt was worth it to get to see what we were seeing. Sadly, we did have to cancel charters for the rest of the day, so we don’t know whether our humpback friends spent all of Wednesday playing in the rain.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: We know that Humpback whales communicate two different ways — by vocalizing, and by using surface-generated signals such as ‘breaching’ or ‘pectoral slapping’. Recently, researchers have found that humpback whales gradually switched from primarily vocal to primarily surface-generated communication in increasing wind speeds and background noise levels. Why would they do that?  The researchers report that surface-generated sounds have energy distributed over a greater frequency range and may be less likely to become confused in periods of high wind-generated noise. Therefore, it may be easier for the whales to communicate to each other by splashing when it’s windy.