APRIL 4, 2009
Here it is April and the humpbacks are still being seen in good numbers! What a way to end a great season with sightings through to the finish, at least that’s what we are hoping for. It has come as somewhat of a surprise to us as the sightings in generous numbers were on the early end, so one would reason the departure might correspond. With the population on the rise each year, perhaps this will set a trend, making for a wider range of viewing months in Hawaii. Time will tell.
While trips vary greatly from day to day or even hour to hour, there have been some recent trips that could easily be confused with the peak of the season in February and March. Typically, it is the mothers and calves that remain behind as the calf needs to stay with its mother on the breeding grounds a good three to four months before it is strong enough to make the long journey north. Not only have we been seeing a good number of mothers and calves, but as one might expect there are still quite a few bulls on the breeding grounds as well, presumably staying late so they might take advantage of some late season mating before they too head back to the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest.
How do we know some of the whales we are seeing are males? A valid question because without the presence of a calf there is simply no way to confirm the gender of a humpback by just looking at it spout at the surface. So what gives the males away? The answer is quite simple and definitive – the humpback song. Even as recent as yesterday we dropped an underwater microphone in to the water and had the hymns of the humpback come booming in over the loud speakers. After we successfully isolated the whale that was singing (there are a few different ways you can do that) we patiently waited for the whale to rise near us so that we could take a photograph of its tail. Patience paid off, after the third surfacing, it lifted its huge tail in to the air and we successfully clicked off a few frames. Now why is that so important? Its important because as we mentioned before it is virtually impossible to tell gender at the surface, but we know from past research projects that only males are responsible for the song, so now we have a photgraph of a whale we know to be male and if we run the photograph through the thousands of others in our database, then we can pull up its record and add the new information to its file. It’s likely we could have been tracking this whale for decades and may have never known its gender before now.
It’s thought to be about a 50/50 split between males and females on the breeding grounds but as these opportunities continue to present themselves and we gather more information on gender, we will be able to more accurately determine the ratio of males to females and be able to better understand the relationships between genders.
Soon we will begin our offshore search for our resident whales as we do miss them during the winter when we are looking inshore for the humpbacks. At least for today though the humpbacks still captivate our attention and lure us in their direction. So while spring break is coming to a close for our terrestial visitors and marking the end of the winter tourism, there is no indication that the end of the humpback season is here.
We look forward to having you aboard one of whale watch adventures. For reservations, call 1-808-322-0028.
See you on the water. Captain Dan