Our staff Tweets, and more!
| Nov. 7, 2009 |
| Written by office staff | |||
| November 11, 2009 23:41 | |||
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We haven't been forgetting to update the blog - its just that November weather has kept us off the water for the last 10 days. We get used to looking for weather "windows" and jumping on them, and we have one now. Jennifer Tackaberry, our catalog and data manager, was the lead scientist today, and here is her report:
What a great day on the water! After an absence of about a week and a half, we were very interested to see if the whales were still in the same area on Jeffreys or if they possibly had moved to a different area. As we headed up our track line we saw a lot of humpback whales: a mom and calf pair, two adults (including Quote, a large female who spends a good deal of time on Jeffreys) and a few juveniles. As we got closer to where the right whales were last seen, we didn't see any blows. After we did a plankton tow, we saw that the amount of plankton in the area was significantly less then we recorded last week. We figured most of the whales had probably moved on, but then we saw one blow, then another, then another! As we slowly moved from whale to whale to get ID photos, we saw more and more whales in the area. We saw at least 4-5 different SAGS of 2-4 individuals and around 3 of those SAGS there were Atlantic white-sided dolphins! The dolphins would switch from swimming around the whales to swimming around the boat. On average white-sided dolphins are 7-9ft long, but they looked tiny compared to the massive body of the right whales. Once we thought we had a photo ID of all the whales in the area, we would see a blow in the distance and there would be another 10 or so animals there. About half of the whales were in SAGs while the other have were either traveling or going down on deep dives. One of the whales even managed to get mud all over its flukes while swimming in water around 400 ft deep! We eventually ran out of time (we need to make sure we are off the Ledge before sunset) so we had to start heading home. We stopped to get a quick ID of another right whale and two humpbacks, Nine and an unknown adult, showed up by the boat. They made their way over to our boat and started to swim back and forth under it. They continued to check out the boat for about 30 mins so we couldn't move. Eventually they got tired of us, so they moved off and we slowly started to head home again. In all we saw around 30 right whales, 15 humpbacks, 5 fin whales, 2 minkes, a few hundred white-sided dolphins, and about 10-15 harbor porpoise. Tomorrow is our next survey so we hope to find just as many whales out there as we explore another section of the Ledge. Check back tomorrow night to see how our day went!
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