Are the whales tagged? How do you find them every day? These are common questions we get from guests during our tours, and the answer is always a little surprising.
Our whales are not tagged, chipped, or otherwise tracked. All whale sightings are done with human eyes on the water! Not only do we have our captains and naturalists looking for our whales, but we also communicate with the other whale watching companies on the water, tug boat captains, ferry operators, and sometimes even the float plane captains give us a heads up!
Without the help of other people on the water, we wouldn’t get to see nearly as many whales as we do.
On today’s trip, it was a group effort that helped locate our whales. An early morning boat out of Vancouver had located a humpback in the Strait of Georgia, so as we left the docks our plan was to go find this whale and see who they were. By the time we made it out, the whale had unfortunately disappeared. Several companies had come to look for this whale, so the captains made a plan to split up and search the area. It didn’t take long before one of the vessels spotted a blow! It wasn’t the same whale as before, but it was a whale nonetheless. In fact, it was 2 whales!

We settled in to watch these whales travelling through the Strait of Georgia, slowly heading northbound. These whales were two humpbacks, a mom and calf pair, that had recently returned from their wintering grounds. Humpbacks migrate to our colder waters for the summers, where they spend several months feeding and getting fat to make their trip home. Today momma Corona was busy doing just that, feeding! We got to watch her lunge feeding as she guided her calf northwards. The little one was glued to mom’s side, attempting to deep dive with her and at one point it looked like they were practicing the lunge feeding, surfacing with their mouth slightly open.

Nanaimo Vancouver Island Whale Watch PNW Pacific Ocean Salish Sea Humpback Lunge Feeding Calf Migration Corona Calf 2022 — Corona was ID’ed on the water by using a photo of her dorsal fin, as she never showed off her tail. These tiny white dots on her dorsal were what tipped us off to her identity. 10:30 AM tour.

This little baby is still relying on their mom’s milk for most nutrients, but they could be getting a taste for solid foods. Corona’s rich milk is 40-60% fat and will help her little one to grow rapidly and store fat throughout the summer before they too make the long migration south in the fall. Baby humpbacks grow fast! Being born around 1 tonne and 10-12 feet long they double in size by their first birthday. That’s a lot of milk to drink in one year.
The whole time baby is learning everything it can from mom. They only get 1 year with her, so while they might not be eating fish and krill now, they have to learn how to so they can survive on their own the following year.

We watched as Corona and her calf would surface, take 3-4 breaths and then dive deep. They would be down for 2-12 minutes, depending on how deep mom had to go for her food. When they would resurface Corona was almost always lunge feeding.
This activity is the most common way our humpbacks feed in our waters. Diving deep below bait balls and surfacing with their mouths open, engulfing as much water as possible, and closing their mouths at the surface. They push that water back out through their baleen plates - up to 300 plates on each side of their mouth - to filter out the fish, krill and anything else small enough to eat. Humpbacks, for their size, have very small throats. When relaxed they are only about as big around as a grapefruit, which means all their food has to be smaller than that to eat!

Corona continued this behaviour of lunge feeding all day long, throughout our morning tour and then again in the afternoon. Thanks to this we were able to get great photos of her big bumpy nose as she pushing water through her baleen plates filtering her food.

Another interesting thing about Corona, who also goes by the name Phi, is that she is an entanglement survivor. In 2019 Corona was spotted in the Strait of Georgia with a crab trap line wrapped around her pec fin and going through her mouth. This line, while small, could impact her ability to dive, swim and feed properly. All whale watchers on the coast had our eyes open for her during tours so we could alert the proper people of her location and hopefully get her released from the lines. She wasn’t sighted again entangled in our area, but was later seen up north, free from the lines. This turned out to be great news, as the following year Corona returned with a calf. This confirmed that Corona was a female, something that was unknown until that time. However, this also meant that she had been entangled while pregnant. Being entangled can affect a humpback’s ability to feed, preventing them from gaining weight for their migration. Knowing that Corona was pregnant meant she had to be eating more food than a regular humpback to put on weight for herself, but also sustain the pregnancy and gain enough extra weight to convert to milk for the calf after they are born, but before they get back to the feeding grounds.
We were very happy to see Corona return with her calf in 2020, and happier to see her return this year with another new baby in tow.

Enjoy the photos of our lunge-feeding momma and her calf from today’s tours taken by marine naturalist Rebeka Pirker.

June 2nd - Corona and calf morning and night

© Vancouver Island Whale Watch 2018-2024. All Rights Reserved.