We left the dock on September 19th with great anticipation of what we might find during the tour today, and it didn’t disappoint! We found two very well-known humpback whales travelling together today: Divot (BCX1057) and Raptor (BCY0660). These two are both known females and prolific ones at that! Raptor has had two recorded calves, one in 2014 (unnamed) and Harpy in 2020! Typically humpbacks will have calves every two to three years, but as Raptor is showing us, that’s not always the case. It will be interesting to see when Raptor brings her next calf back to the Salish Sea!

Divot has had a few more calves and some of them are now mothers themselves, making her a grandmother! She had Zephyr in 2011 (now a mother), a calf in 2014, Olympus in 2018 (also a mother), and Slice in 2021. Divot herself is the suspected daughter of potentially the most famous humpback in the Salish Sea: Big Momma! She has brought back 7 different calves to the Salish Sea over her record here, and is a great-grandmother herself!

These two travelling together could be a coincidence, but pregnant humpbacks have been recorded spending longer amounts of time together, so maybe we should be keeping an eye out for these two with calves in tow next year!

No matter why they are travelling together, it’s an amazing sight to have two fully grown humpback whale females together, as the females tend to get larger than the males. Divot is one of the larger whales in the population that we have noticed, If not the largest.

Today these two were just hanging out at the surface, doing a behaviour called Logging. They call it that since the whales sit right below the surface, not diving or moving much, making it easy to mistake them for logs on the water. This behaviour is still important, since it typically means that the whales are sleeping, getting their much-needed rest.

Whales’ sleep patterns are quite different from those of humans. They cannot afford to go into a deep sleep like humans do because they have to consciously breathe. Whales are voluntary breathers, which means they must think about coming to the surface to breathe air and consciously open up their blowholes. To overcome this challenge, whales have developed a mechanism called unihemispheric slow-wave sleep. This means that only one hemisphere of their brain sleeps at a time, while the other remains awake and alert. The sleeping hemisphere rests while the whale continues to swim and surface for air, and then they switch sides. This method allows them to rest one half of their brain at a time, ensuring they are always partially aware and able to breathe.

This adaptation is crucial for their survival, as they need to be conscious to avoid predators, navigate, and, of course, breathe. Different species of whales may have variations in how they employ this sleep pattern, but the general concept remains the same across most cetaceans.

The upside of getting to see sleeping whales is that they spend a lot more time at the surface than usual, making it very easy to watch them. The downside is that without the need to do any sort of deep diving, they won’t be lifting their tails out of the water. The underside of that tail is what we typically need to ID the animals, although in special cases with unique dorsal fins, we can use those instead. These two lovely ladies were mostly identified through the use of very small parts of their tails, but mostly by their dorsal fins.

Even without their tails up, the onboard naturalist Cheyenne Brewster got some amazing photos from the day which can all be viewed below.