It’s not very often that we can start the day knowing that there is whales waiting for us right outside the harbour, but that was the case today! An early, shore-based report alerted us to a group of Orca that were travelling south from North Nanaimo, and by the time we caught up with them, they were just to the northwest of Gabriola Island, about a 5-minute drive outside of the Nanaimo Harbour. It was clear looking at the whales as we approached, this was a T-Party! We call it a T-Party when there are multiple pods of Bigg (aka Transient) orca travelling together. Sometimes they are just acting like normal orca, travelling or resting together, but other times like today, they are celebrating! We were able to confirm the following pods as being present, but it’s very possible that there might have been more hiding in the mix that we didn’t get photos of:

It is exciting for the whales when they get together, given that they are such social creatures. Usually, the groups that they travel in are their family members, a mother leading a bunch of her kids around. This means not only that you mostly get to spend time with your own family, but also that there wouldn’t be any breeding opportunities. Meeting up with other whales lets you potentially find a mate, but more often it means extra socializing with whales that you don’t normally get to see. Sometimes during T-Parties you will see the divide happen among age groups of the whales, with the whales similar ages grouping up. Sometimes, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it and we can only guess. It’s interesting that these two matriarchs are so close in age to each other. Perhaps they are old friends from when they were younger? It’s fun to guess!

We were very lucky to see a lot of surface activity during our time spent with the T065Bs and T075Bs, with them breaching, tail slapping, porpoising through the water, and spy hopping. It was super exciting to watch, and even harder to leave them when the time came, but it’s part of minimizing our impact on them to only spend an hour with any group of whales, so we left them to their party and continued on.

Next up was the search for humpback whales as we tried to make this a double species day. We first came across two humpback whales travelling together who appeared to be feeding in the area. Lucky for us this meant that one of them was lifting their tail to help them dive deeper, and we got a nice photo of their tail helping us ID them as Scoop (BCX0870). Later, looking at the dorsal fins in the photos we were able to ID Scoop’s friend as Mantis (BCX0936)! We know that Scoop is female from having brought back calves to the area before, but we aren’t sure about Mantis. Maybe as we see mantis more we will be able to confirm their gender!

After spending some time with these two, we continued and found another group of humpback whales, this time a trio instead of a duo. These whales also seemed to be in socializing mode, travelling closely together and getting up to all sorts of shenanigans. Throughout our time with these whales, we were able to get photos of their tails and identify them as Squirrel (BCX2183), Neptune (BCY1021), and Viking (BCY1063) travelling together! It seemed like there was something in the water today, having lots of surface activity from these whales as well. One whale in particular (Squirrel) was doing all sorts of things like swimming upside down and pec-slapping, tail-slapping, and even breaching out of the water! This seemed to get the other whales riled up as well, as we started to hear some trumpeting coming from the whales, and then they seemed to get curious and come over to the boats. This can be dangerous for the whales if you aren’t expecting it since boats can pose threats such as strikes and propeller injury. This is why we have distance regulations to follow, but part of those are if the whales come too close you just have to shut down and wait for the whale to swim away before you start up again. This is exactly what we did when we noticed the change in behaviour and direction towards us. It didn’t last long, just a couple of close surfaces before they continued and focused more on each other rather than us. It wasn’t just these whales that reacted to Squirrel’s jumps and slaps, but another whale in the distance also seemed to react and started breaching and tail slapping themselves, it was Moray (BCY1176)!

As they were leaving us behind, we noticed something at the base of Neptune’s tail as they dove, something red. Although this can sometimes seem scary, with a cloud of red forming with a whale it’s nothing to be concerned about, that is whale poop! The colour comes from the krill that they eat, with the exoskeleton causing the colour change. When you eat huge amounts of food that a humpback does it has an impact on their bodies. Not only does it change the colour of their poop, but it also changes other things, like the colour of a lactating whale’s milk! The humpbacks always poop at the surface like this, which is great for the ecosystem since they usually feed deeper in the water column. This helps move nutrients around and concentrates them. Since the plankton at the surface requires these nutrients moving them up the column helps increase their growth, and therefore it produces more food for the humpback whales. This is a positive feedback loop since the more humpbacks are in the area, the more nutrients will get moved and concentrated, and therefore there will be more food produced for the humpbacks, and therefore more humpbacks will be able to come back, and so on. We ended up seeing a couple more pooping examples from these whales before it was time for us to leave.

We continued towards the Northern Tip of Gabriola Island again, this time not for whales, but to see if there were seals spending time on the seal haul out. It turned out that there was! The harbour seals are about the most predictable animals that we see on their tours, spending time in the same places almost every day. We try and look for them any time the tides cooperate with us! Today there was something special spotted on the rocks, with a freshly born harbour seal pup, still having part of its umbilical cord attached. This likely means that it was only a few hours old! Even though it was alone and mom wasn’t in sight, that is totally normal and nothing to be worried about, since they will leave the pups alone for hours at a time while they go to hunt! Harbour Seal Pups can start finding their food within a month, so independence is very important for them.

Finally, we stopped at the Gabriola Bluffs and got to see the cormorants that were nesting there, as well as having a great look at the young bald eagle at the nest a little further south. It was a spectacular morning getting to see not only both species, but socializing and surface activity from them. The onboard naturalists Desarae Poier, Lucy Willis, and Vanessa Vereschahen captured some great photos during this trip, all of which can be viewed below!

June 30, 2024, 10:30 am - T-party and Humpback Land

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