We went everywhere by boat on this trip, and on almost every outing we saw humpbacks. This is the first of two posts, setting the scene for the climax in Part 2!
One day was devoted to heading down Knight’s Inlet towards the ocean. As luck would have it, there was thick fog, almost whiteout, which didn’t really lift till after 1pm. It was beautiful in its own way:
We could hear humpbacks blowing around us. Usually we glimpsed just a tantalizing bit of a humpback, like this tail fluke
or just the dorsal fin disappearing into the mist, under a cloud of gulls:
or more excitingly a head:
Even when the fog lifted, it would be just a sliver of back, and a wraithly blow enshrouding another gull:
Sometimes there were two, the dorsal fin and humped back of one in mid-dive (how it got its name); and the final tail flourish of another at the end of its dive:
Individuals can be identified by their tail fin. I sent this photo in to the Happy Whale database, and they ID’ed it as Spectrum, aka BCY0944, first identified in 2004. He/she honeymoons in Hawaii, where he/she was sighted off Maui in 2019. That’s a 5400 mile round trip. https://happywhale.com/individual/68229;enc=321622
Occasionally, you see an entire whale, but obviously not when you are pointing your camera that way and have it in focus. (Mark Carwardine will have sharp beautifully lit shots of this behavior, but this is my blog, so you are stuck with my fuzzy ones.) For unknown reasons , humpbacks breach, the name for an explosive jump right out of the water, with no warning, taking a brief two seconds till it has disappeared once more:
In relative slow motion they backflop down, one pectoral fin raised skywards in a Roman valedictory wave:
You can just discern the white underside of that same pectoral fin amidst the plumes of spray below:
Adult humpbacks are up to 17 m (56 ft) long, or 1.5 double-decker buses, and weigh up to 44 US tons (40,000 Kg) , so the ensuing splash is quite magnificent.
This jump consumed as much energy as a 60Kg human uses to run a marathon.
There is an excellent discussion of breach behavior here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7065906/
in which the authors report that Segre et al. (2020) call a breach the “most expensive burst maneuver” in all of nature, pushing the boundaries of muscular performance and providing an honest signal of a whale’s general health. That would send an important signal to surrounding males, and might make the energy expenditure worthwhile.
PS Humpbacks are, on the whole, a conservation success story. The US has now removed 9 of the 14 sub-populations from the endangered species list, including the ones like Spectrum that breed in Hawaii. But 5 sub-populations are still on the list, and categorized as threatened because their numbers are still low. This includes the ones that breed in Mexico, where some of the ones we saw most likely go. On the bright side, at least some go to Hawaii! And all humpbacks are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the international ban on commercial whaling.
PPS Next time, bubble-netting.