It was another great morning spent on the water with our lovely humpback whales. We were lucky enough to see a couple of our favourites today!

Two of our vessels only got to see one of them, but it was a fantastic interaction! It was one of the local troublemakers who has been making a splash during all of his appearances this year; Chi (BCZ0414 calf 2021)! Chi is a young whale who has a real curiosity for the vessels in the area. This can be a dangerous habit, especially if he isn’t very picky about what boats he approaches. Whale watchers quickly learned to be extra cautious around this young whale since he has a very high likelihood of approaching, and if your engines aren’t shut down the noise and movement can cause issues for the animal. An approach to the boat is exactly what happened when we were watching Chi today. Since we knew it was possible once we saw his very distinct white fluke, as soon as we saw a direction change towards us we shut down and just had to sit there until he got bored of us. And boy, this took a while! We were sitting there with this whale bouncing back and forth between our two open vessels blowing bubbles under the water at us, sticking his face out of the water, cartwheeling under the surface, and putting their ventral side nearly all the way out of the water. It was quite a sight to see!

This close interaction also gives us a good look at the parasites that live on Chi’s skin. There are three different types that we observed: acorn barnacles, goose-necked Barnacles, and whale lice. Acorn Barnacles are the most obvious, growing to be over 5 inches tall on humpback whales, and sometimes embedded into the skin. They look like round white, well, barnacles that are growing on the whale. The next one, Goose-necked barnacles, are a less common sight. They have a peach-coloured fleshy stalk with smaller, more delicate-looking plates on the top of it that house the main body of the barnacle. These specific ones also have two fleshy “ears” just like a bunny! I guess that’s why they’re called the Rabbit-eared Whale Barnacle. These typically require a hard surface to attach to, so they are found growing on the plates of the more sturdy acorn barnacles. The final parasite, the whale lice, looks like tiny crabs that are holding onto the skin of the humpback whale, but with more legs. interestingly, unlike the other two species, the whale lice don’t have a free-swimming stage to their life cycle so if a whale has lice, we know they had to physically be in contact with another whale that had lice. This is actually a commonly used non-invasive method to tracking population interactions with our humpback whales, as the DNA of the lice tells the same general story as the DNA of the humpback.

Given these descriptions do you think you can spot all three of the species described in the photos?

While two boats were getting to see Chi, the semi-covered boat was on its own adventure getting to see a pair of humpbacks travelling together. Based on the tail, we know that one is Geometry (BCZ0338) and based on the dorsal fin, we suspect that the other is Vivaldi (BCX1704). These two were likely sleeping as we watched them since they were doing very slow surfaces and weren’t lifting their tails out of the water when they went under the surface.

After spending some time with these two sleeping at the surface, this vessel also headed over to where the others were with Chi and got to see him as well.

It was a great day spent with our humpback whales, and the naturalists got some really great photos from the day, all of which can be viewed below!

Photos by Marine Naturalists Cheyenne Brewster, Des Poier, and Ella Hillbrecht.