June 19, 2024, 3:30pm - Jude and Cooper, and a handful of humpbacks!
When we left the dock for the afternoon tour, we knew that the whales that we had seen in the morning were likely too far away from us now to be able to find them, but lucky for us, a family member of one of the staff was lucky enough to have seen a different group of orca that we didn’t know about before! Thanks to this report, we decided to head north, towards Nanoose Bay for the afternoon since that was where he had spotted them.
The boats went searching and were rewarded when they saw the tall black dorsal fin of an orca in the distance, we had found them! These two whales were quickly identified as:
T049A2 Jude ♂ (2007)
T124C Cooper ♂ (1992)
These two males have been spending time together for the last little while, and Cooper was travelling with another lone Male (T087 Harbeson) before that. Since orca are social creatures it’s not surprising that they seek out companionship with other whales. What might surprise you is that these interactions aren’t always platonic friendships! There are many cases of male-male orca relationships. They are thought to help form social bonds, similar to the social-sexual behaviour seen in bonobos, and to act as practice for when the time comes to involve a sexually mature female in the activity. We didn’t see any canoodling happening today though, it was purely travel as these two boys headed down the Island.
When watching the whales, we try and only spend up to an hour with any group of whales to reduce the potential effect we might have on them, so it was time to leave them to it, and we headed off to see what else we might find in our explorations.
Soon we spotted something in the distance, a blow! It seems like we came across some humpback whales. It was a group of two, and from the size difference, we knew it was a mom-calf pair. After closer examination of a few photos, we confirmed these whales as Slits (BCY0946) and her 2024 calf! These two are quickly becoming a favourite humpback pair this year, since Slits has such a harrowing story, and her calf is such a cute bouncing baby! It was great getting to see these two again. It seemed like they were concentrating on feeding while we were watching them, since they were doing longer dives as we travelled with them.
We left them to it and continued back towards Nanaimo, only to be stopped by another humpback whale in our path! This shy humpback didn’t stay for long, just enough time two give us a look at it’s dorsal fin below disappearing beneath the waves. From this brief encounter, we think this could be Ocular (BCX1705), but we have to still work on confirming this!
There was one last humpback that we saw before returning to the dock, and that was Coyote (BCX0937calf2021)! Coyote also seemed to be doing a mix between travelling and feeding when we found them, although they cooperated enough to show us the bottom of their tail fluke, leading to a confirmed ID!
Finally, after getting to see so many whales on the way home, we made it back to Nanaimo. The naturalist onboard this afternoon, Hayleigh Hilbert, captured some amazing photos during the trip, all of which can be viewed below!
T124C Cooper has a very straight dorsal.
Unlike Cooper, T049A2 Jude’s dorsal fin is bent. Jude has one of the biggest bends in the entire population.
Can you figure out who is Cooper and who is Jude?
One of the ways we can ID our orca is by looking at the dorsal fins
Another way to ID our orca is by looking at the scars on the saddle patch.
T124C Cooper!
Slits’ 2024 calf.
This calf’s still got a lot of growing to do.
Did you know orca only have 1 nostril but humpbacks have 2?
The small bumps you see on Coyote’s back are actually sea lice.
Fluking
Going for a dive!