A football field worth of whale

By BARBARA TAORMINA

Staff writer

Their hearts are the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and 20 people can fit comfortably in the mouths.

Blue whales, the largest mammals on the planet, have always fascinated people because of their size. Last weekend, local whale watchers had plenty to be fascinated with when two, possibly three, blue whales were spotted on Jeffreys Ledge and Tillies Bank about 20 to 25 miles off the coast of Cape Ann.

Even naturalist Mason Weinrich, who has been studying and watching whales for 23 years at Gloucester's Whale Center of New England had only one word to sum up the sightings.

"Wow," he said. "It's just the only way to describe it."

The first blue whale, a juvenile about 70 feet long, was spotted on Friday afternoon of last week by a New Hampshire whale watch boat. The next afternoon, two blue whales were seen simultaneously about 10 miles apart.

Weinrich suspects a third blue whale has moved in and made it a crowd because the animal he saw on Sunday raised and flapped its tail.

"It's a personality thing," said Weinrich. "Some bring their tails in the air, some don't. The whale we saw Saturday didn't. The whale we saw Sunday did it on a regular basis."

Weinrich, who last saw a blue whale in local waters nine years ago, said having three blue whales in the area is remarkable.

"There's never been a time when we've had more than one, and never for more than a day," he said.

Weinrich said the whales normally prefer the colder waters of northern Canada and Iceland. They are here to feed on vast amounts of krill that appeared this summer.

Large schools of krill, an open-ocean crustacean, had plenty of food because of a sharp decline in the sand eel population on Georges Bank. Both the eels and krill feed on the same plankton; without the competition for food, the krill population exploded.

That bump in the ecosystem was somehow sensed by the blue whales, which showed up to take advantage of a good meal.

"For at least the short term, there's a gap in the ecosystem that allows an explosion in the ecosystem," said Weinrich. "It's really a dynamic system where you see amazing and wonderful things like this."

Blue whales, which are actually dark grey, can grow up to 100 feet in length and weigh up to 150 tons.

Weinrich understands people are awed by the animals because of their size, and he has plenty of "fun facts" to share.

"An adult human can climb through a blue whale's aorta," he said with a laugh.

But Weinrich is also quick to point out that blue whales, like so many other whales, are endangered because of the relentless whaling that occurred during the early decades of the 20th century.

From 1920 to 1930, about 35,000 blues whales were killed in the Antarctic.

"The main reason they were killed was for their oil," said Weinrich. "It was used first to make nitroglycerine and, later, margarine and soap."

Hunting blue whales was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1963, but the population has not rebounded as scientists hoped.

An estimated 1,000 to 3,000 blue whales roam near Antarctica and 1,000 to 1,500 whales swim in the North Atlantic.

Those numbers make the visit by the blue whales even more extraordinary for naturalists like Weinrich, who never grow completely immune to wonder of such animals.

"For some of us who have been out here and have become a little jaded, this is still amazing," he said. "You see something like this and you just say, 'yes.'"