Sunny Sunday

Another active feeding frenzy out on Jeffrey's Ledge yesterday. During both our trips we found Flask the Humpback whale open mouth feeding and filtering the ocean water for fish and plankton with his more than 600 baleen plates! Baleen whale use their baleen plates, made of a protein called keratin, as a type of filtering mechanism to catch their food.

When a whale has a whole mouthful of salt water and fish in it's mouth, the whale will close it's mouth most of the way and use it's large tongue to push up against the inside of these baleen plates to push all that salt water through the plate and back out into the ocean. Any food in the whale's mouth cannot pass through the tiny hairs found on the inside of these baleen plates thus creating a barrier to keep all that food in the whale's mouth. Finally once the salt water is gone the whale will use it's large tongue and scrape everything off of the inside of the baleen plates and swallow all it's food whole. Our passengers were quite lucky to get a chance to watch this process occur with Flask as well as with a handful of Fin whales in the area!

During our morning trip we came across two adult fin whales lunging together! What an amazing spectacle in which my photo does not come close to showing off this behavior. Sorry it's a bit out of focus but you can still tell there are two whales, one with it's mouth WIDE open, scooping up food and water combined. Fin whales can over 800 baleen plates in their mouths and utilize the same technique as humpback whales do to eat their food!

With our afternoon trip people didn't really know where to look because we had Fin whales lunging through the water in every direction around the boat. At one point we had 3 adult fin whales within our viewing area who each lunged through the water almost instantaneously! We thought things couldn't get any better but we were wrong.

One of the fin whales corralling food in our area surfaced right next to the boat and surprised just about everyone standing on the starboard (or right) side. The boat had already been shut down since the whales seemed to be coming in all direction so we were enjoying sitting there and watching these behaviors. But to have a 60ft animal surface UPSIDE down so close to us was insane. You could see this Fin whale's pleats fully extended and must have been filtering out all that water when it then rolled back upright and flatten back out before sinking back under the water from where it came from. HOLY MOLY! It was sooooo cool!

What a great way to end the week. Can't wait to take more passenger out this week to see what kind of experience we can have as we go and search for these wild animals.