1100 Whale Watch - Fred
[Note: Having been placed on the "naturalist disabled list", I was a guest whale watcher today on the Capt. John & Son IV - Krill served as the naturalist on this particular trip.]
Today was a beautifully clear day on the water. The wind had come around towards the un-tropical NE, and visibility was excellent (practically unlimited). There was a gentle (2 foot or less) NE sea, and a slight (1 foot) ESE swell only when out beyond the lee of Cape Cod, which is where we were when watching whales, out beyond the SE edge of Stellwagen Bank. Today we found ourselves in an area with close to a dozen humpback whales, who were surface feeding for a change (unlike most of the trips over the past few weeks, when the whales seemed to be feeding deep below the surface). This did give us a chance to confirm the assumption that, when Cajun (flukeshot above) was feeding on fish with her calf (flukeshot below), the calf did indeed appear to be feeding, and not merely "going through the motions".
Humpback calves spend their entire time during their first spring, summer, and fall in Massachusetts closely associated with their mothers. However, while their main source of food, especially in the spring, is their mother's milk, during the summer we get to see the calves seemingly doing some chasing around of fish along with their mothers and sometimes with other adults (even as they still spend some time nursing each day), and, by the fall, they do have to be getting pretty good at catching fish, because they ordinarily will be weaned before their first year of life has passed. Because over the last few weeks we have seen so little surface feeding, it has been difficult to say for sure that we were witnessing the calves progressing towards self-feeding, even when we saw them diving along with their feeding mothers, coming back up with them (or just before them) a few minutes later.
However, on this trip, since the whales were able to find prey close to the surface, we could actually observe feeding by the calves (and there were three mom/calf pairs in the area). The image above shows Cajun and her calf surfacing while feeding, and the cropped image below shows the calf's full participation in the maneuver. (A full set of baleen plates can be seen, as well - humpback calves, as baleen whales, don't get erupting "baby teeth" like most mammals do, of course, but they do have to grow a set of baleen plates to feed on schools of fish.)
An image (below) from a second later in time, shows the youngster's mouth closing, but, more importantly, also shows that the lower jaw is distended, as its throat pleats have opened up like accordion pleats as he/she has engulfed a large quantity of water with (hopefully) a quantity of fish within.
One particularly rewarding part of today's trip involved seeing Salt, the Grand Dame of Massachusetts humpbacks, and her 2010 calf (image of Salt's flukes next to her calf, below). Salt was first seen in Massachusetts in 1976 (which is not, however, a record), but she has been seen in Massachusetts ~every~ year since 1976 (which ~is~ a record). To many Massachusetts naturalists, each whale watch season does not "officially" begin until Salt has been spotted for the first time.
Back in the mid-1970's, when whale watching was still in its infancy, Salt was the first humpback to have ever been given a descriptive name, based on her dorsal fin (see the image showing both sides below), which has a prominent white scar on its leading edge, appearing very much like crusted-on sea salt - hence Salt's name. There is probably not a whale watch naturalist in Massachusetts, regardless of whether it's his/her first season or the "thirty-somethingeth" season, that does not get excited when that distinctive dorsal fin first comes into view.
When Salt was first seen here in 1976, she was probably a young adult, and she had her first known calf (named Crystal) in 1980. This year she is in "our" waters accompanied by her twelfth calf (named Zelle), and she may now be close to forty years old. As a whale watch naturalist, one of the most frequently asked questions I have been asked (when I haven't already discussed the topic) is "How long do whales live?". Considering that Salt is probably getting close to forty (and considering the fact that she likely has not gone through menopause yet), it is easy to believe that a commonly given estimate of whale life span of fifty-to-seventy years does not seem unreasonable - very possibly, large baleen whales have a life span similar to that of humans, at least before the "Age of Medicine". Salt does certainly ~seem~ older now - older whales gradually develop arthritic spinal columns, and Salt's sounding dives, while still absolutely incredibly graceful, have gradually become seemingly stiffer and definitely slower over the years.
Speaking personally (but I am certain that this thought must have been realized by others), it is difficult to accept the fact that there ~will~ someday be a whale watch season when Salt, with all her majesty and beauty, will no longer grace Massachusetts waters.
One of the other females we watched on today's trip (who has also had a number of calves - she was here with her eighth calf during last season) is a real survivor named Glo, first seen here in 1984. Glo's tail flukes (image above) are nearly instantly recognizable from above or from below (they're almost all black below) simply by their shape alone - she likely suffered a collision with a boat many years ago, and she is missing much of her left tail fluke as a result. Nonetheless, she not only has survived, using her tail flukes to migrate back and forth between New England and the Caribbean every year, she also can still employ her tail flukes very effectively for "kick feeding" (and that's what she is doing in the above image - slapping her tail flukes against the water surface to stun, confuse, or otherwise somehow aid feeding upon schools of fish).
On our way back to Plymouth, we passed (and had a good view of) a northbound tug pulling a barge, heading towards Boston from the Cape Cod Canal (that's the smokestack at the power plant near the E end of the Canal, about 15 miles away in Sandwich, in the left background in the telephoto image above). Fortunately, the path from the Canal to Boston Harbor, close to the South Shore of Massachusetts, does not usually have as many whales present as further offshore (although this is not always true, and, during some seasons, there can be significant numbers of right whales there during the late winter and early spring).
