June 3 Prince of Whales

Today was quite the interesting day! We were heading offshore to find some fin whale reported to us by our friends on the Atlantic Queen. As we approached, we found a few more blows a little bit away from them. Not wanting to crowd any whales with more than one boat, we moved over to the other blows. Turns out we found a mother/calf pair of humpback whales!! Even more exciting was that the mom was Trident, one of our favorites (who breached 47 times in a row a couple years ago!!) and a regular visitor to Jeffreys Ledge. The calf was looking healthy and was also nursing during our time with them!

Trident and her new calf

Trident going down for a deeper dive

A third humpback with a distinctive white scar on its left side was nearby and we got a couple quick looks at that whale but it seemed to be traveling away from us.

Our third humpback with white scar on its side

We continued on, leaving Trident and her calf in peace and found two more humpback whales!! These whales were not easily ID'able but upon some work with the cataloged images we have now identified these two! Flicker was the smaller of the two...

Flicker

And Bayou was the whale with the disfigured flukes.

Bayou

The very cool part of this sighting is that Bayou is Trident's 2006 calf!!! So Bayou's mom was less than a mile away? Do you think Trident knew her kid was here? Or did Bayou know its mom was nearby with a new sibling???

Also of interest was that Flicker showed signs of a recent entanglement. If you look closely at that image you may see some areas of pink tissue where the fluke meets the body...evidence of chaffing, likely from some form of fishing gear. But Flicker also had entanglement scars last year so this would be at least the second time this whale has encountered fishing gear, severe enough to cause damage to its body.

On our way home, after getting quick looks at a minke and fin whale, we stopped on another whale that appeared to be logging or sleeping. Upon closer inspection, this whale was the one who was near Trident and her calf with the white scar on its left side.

As we approached the dozing whale, we noticed some odd behavior and then saw a bright orange rope along the whale's right side. This humpback whale was entangled!! Entanglements are huge problems for all marine life and can be deadly. The odd part of the story is that this same whale appeared to be fine less than an hour before, and we never saw any fishing gear in the area. The whale's behavior led us to believe that it may be anchored in some kind of fishing gear that it recently found but it is possible that it had been entangled the first time we saw it, when it was close to Trident.

In any event, we contacted our friends at the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies who is permitted to disentangle large whales. They or their representatives were on their way out to this whale to better assess the situation and possibly attempt to free the whale.

We will keep you posted on the outcome once we learn more.

We at Blue Ocean Society are dedicated to conserving marine life and their habitat. Hopefully with more research and efforts to document and remove derelict fishing gear we can reduce the chance that a whale encounters this non-working gear to help protect whales from deadly or injuring entanglements in the future.

Thanks to all of the wonderful students from the Sunapee and Bethlehem schools! You were great! Hope to see you back again next spring!

** This just in- we have learned the identity of the entangled whale- the 2009 calf of Lavalier. We will be on the lookout over the weekend for this whale and hope it is able to free itself of this rope.

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