May 23rd 10:30 AM - Graze the Humpback

On the morning of the 23rd, we headed out of the harbour in search of some whales. We travelled south through the gulf islands and found ourselves near the Washington board along the eastern coast of Mayne Island when we spotted a blow. It was a humpback! This lone whale was surfacing, travelling and doing some deep dives, likely eager to fill their stomach after a long winter of no food.

Humpbacks are notorious for doing deep dives and sticking to areas for days to weeks at a time. This is because humpbacks return to our region for one purpose, to eat as much as they can. When a humpback finally returns to our cold waters they are running on fumes, so to speak. They spend their summers here eating as much as they can, often over 3000 lbs of food a day, in order to build up massive fat stores before their migration south next fall. These whales stop eating once they leave our waters, relying on those ample fat stores to get them to the tropics, through the breeding season, and then back to us in the spring. When a humpback finally returns they look for large bait balls of small schooling fish, plankton and krill, and will spend days or even weeks feeding in one area before moving on to the next bait ball.

While this whale was feeding we were able to ID her as Graze, BCY0523, a female humpback known to travel all the way to Hawaii during the winters. Graze is a confirmed female, as she was seen in our waters in 2019 with a calf. Often this is how we find out if our humpbacks are male or female, by waiting to see if they ever return with a calf! While this method can take a very long time, it’s often the easiest way to determine their gender. this method isn’t foolproof tho, as female humpbacks may be infertile or may never have a calf that survives, so a lack of a calf does not mean that the whale is a male. The other option is waiting for one of our whales to breach and getting that lucky photo that shows their hemispherical lobe, or lack of. These lobes are located near the base of the whale’s tail and their genital slit. Female humpbacks will have a lobe, whereas male humpbacks will not.

Enjoy the photos of Graze, and our California sea lions, taken by marine naturalist Keagan Sjolie.