It was sure a long haul to get down to where our orca were spotted today, but boy was it worth it to see the T075Bs travelling with a brand new baby, and T077D Alycon was also hanging out. The T075Bs aren’t a common pod for us to see, with only a handful of sightings of them for us between opening in 2018 and now. This was one of our favourites though, since there is a brand new baby travelling with them, who is only a couple of weeks old! Updated by researchers to be the calf of T075B2, it was so cute to see this little chubby baby. The whales that we saw were:

T075B Pebbles (1995)
T075B2 Fifi / Jasper (2015)
T075B2A (2023)
T075B3 Rubble (2017)
T075B4 (2021)
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T077D Alycon (2009)

You will probably notice that the youngest whale doesn’t look the exact same as the other orca. Where they have the bold black and white colouration, the white on the newborn isn’t quite white yet. It will look orange, fading to peach in a couple months, and finally getting to be white usually within two years.

This colour difference is due to a couple of things, the first of which being that the orca don’t have a fully developed blubber layer until they get a bit older and have more time to feed. This in combination with thinner skin will lead to the blood vessels being more visible from the skins surface. This changes the colour to the more orange we see in the shite sections of the calves.

If they are very freshly born you might even be lucky enough to see fetal folds on a baby whale. Since they have a relatively long gestation period (13-15 months) they will be folded inside of mom, and sometimes these folds persist outside the womb. They don’t last long though, so you know you are seeing a very “fresh” calf if there are present. As far as we can tell from our photos T075B2A didn’t have any present.

The other odd thing about this encounter was the presence of T077D Alycon! This whale typically travels with her brother T077C Neftali away from the rest of their pod, but today they themselves were separated. We actually ended up seeing T077C Neftali right off Nanaimo later this day travelling with troublemaker T065A5 Indy. There was rumours of Alycon having her own calf last year who died very early on, so we wonder if she was just trying to get some baby time in spending time with another new mom. Although this is all speculation, it wouldn’t be too far fetched since orca are very emotional animals. One of the Southern Resident Orca who had a calf who passes away pushed the body of said calf around for nearly a month and 1000km after it passed. This emotional connection might explain why Alycon would be trying to fill the baby-sized hole in her life.

No matter why she was travelling with this other pod today it was great to see her again!

It wasn’t all whales today either, we got to see a lovely haul-out of Harbour Seals on the way down, with the seals sitting on the rocks drinking in the sunshine.

All the photos today were taken by the onboard naturalists Aly Kohlman, Des Poier, and Val Watson and can be viewed below!