August 29th 10:30 - Delta, Corona, and Nuage in the Strait of Georgia

Our morning trip had quite the experience with this trio of Humpbacks today. These three have very distinct flukes, and thankfully all three of them cooperated and showing them to us today! Delta has a gorgeous fluke with white triangular streaking near the base on either side. Nuage has a unique cloud-like marking right at the middle of its fluke. Corona’s fluke is very dark black with only a bit of white on either fluke tip.

This is an interesting group to observe because we have not seen them together before. Corona is a known female, while Nuage and Delta are unknowns (we do not know if they are female or male). This may be a group of 3 pregnant ladies travelling around together having lunch dates, or maybe it is a pair of females being escorted around by a male. Unfortunately it is very difficult to tell humpback' whales’ gender due to them showing very little sexual dimorphism (the males and females look virtually the same). If we get a nice clear shot of an individual’s belly/peduncle area, sometimes we can tell gender from that. We do know our females have a special bump called the Hemispherical Lobe but this is quite hard to photograph as it requires the whale to be breaching. When a humpback does breach, there is usually so much water coming off of its body that it can be impossible to distinguish this bump from the rest of their body.

Nuage is also an interesting whale because we actually know who her mother is! Her mother, Big Mama, is actually quite famous here in the Salish Sea - she was the first individual humpback that was spotted off of our coast after a roughly 50 year period of never seeing them.

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Jilann LechnerAugust 31, 2021Comment