[Everybody has a past; ours is just a little more colorful and varied than most people's. Here's an article from a whale watching cruise we ran before moving our whale watching company from Monterey to Moss Landing.]
Posted November 30, 2000
Next Of Kin
Getting high, spyhopped and slimed by Monterey Bay's friendly humpbacks.
By Traci Hukill
A small, fleece-clad group huddles in the storefront of Randy''s Fishing Trips on the wharf, still flushed and excited from the brisk salt air and thrill of the recent encounter. This gaggle is comprised of a British couple on holiday, a sketchbook-toting naturalist and Captain Heidi Tiura, owner of the Sanctuary. All the others, including the German tourist with his digital camcorder and the two women who held perfumed Kleenexes to their noses during the whole thing, have left to ruminate upon the wonders they''ve seen today.
Whale-watching doesn''t get any better than this.
The stragglers are chattering like fifth graders on a field trip, trying to keep from interrupting each other. The smell of the whales, everyone agrees, was overpowering.
"The most disgusting smell--rotten fish, rotten sea everything," exclaims the British woman, wrinkling her nose.
"Just a very rich smell," the naturalist chimes in.
"Awful," declares Tiura cheerfully. "Whale breath is the worst smell on earth."
It slimes you, too. Sticks to your glasses, coats your sleeves.
"We''re gettin'' covered in whale snot!" came the triumphant call that started it all, radioed from the captain of the Star of Monterey to the Sanctuary earlier today. Friendly humpbacks had approached the Star of Monterey off Moss Landing and were delighting the passengers with an array of behaviors designed specifically, it seemed, to thrill and endear, beginning with the wet and pungent act of exhaling through their blowholes.
The Sanctuary, whose passengers had already received admirable dividends on their $27 investments with a dolphin pod sighting, headed toward the vicinity of the Star of Monterey.
Then it happened.
The Sanctuary shut down its motors. Two humpbacks approached the boat, blowing, disappearing, resurfacing with a deliciously slow rolling motion, curving their dappled backs more deeply each time until they dove and their flukes flipped up and slipped noiselessly back into the drink. They came closer and blew, christening the Sanctuary and her stunned guests with warm blasts of foul air moist with condensation.
They swam beneath the boat, "glowing" blue-green in the sunlit water, and hung beneath the hull, pectoral fins spread out on either side of the boat''s bottom.
They came back out and blew some more, then repeatedly slapped their fins and flukes on the water''s surface.
They spyhopped, lifting their great, pickle-shaped heads out of the water for a better look at the boat.
They blew again.
It went on like this for half an hour. The naturalist was sketching furiously. The German tourist was pointing and shooting. The two women were breathing through their cologne-dabbed tissues. The British tourists were giving thanks they hadn''t gone to Las Vegas instead.
Captain Tiura was lost in her favorite altered state, awash with the feelings of peace and happiness that come with one of these close encounters with cetaceans.
Whaleness all around
Back on the wharf, the passengers are hard pressed to explain why they were so touched. "You can''t describe it, really," sighs the British woman.
"They knew we were there," adds her companion with conviction.
"When it came up next to the boat," muses the naturalist, "and there was whaleness all around you, you got this lump in your throat. You didn''t know what to think."
"I have a whale hangover," says Tiura.
"Friendly" is an adjective that, applied to whales, makes specialists wince and tour guides happy. It''s often used to describe the behavior of gray whales in their calving lagoons off the coast of Baja. When you see the pictures of people leaning over the edges of skiffs to pet the whales in those luminous, warm waters, "friendly" seems like as good a word as any. Even better, people tell stories of mothers bringing their calves to the boats as if showing them off.
That''s more than "friendly" to a layperson''s sensibilities. That''s "bonding."
But it doesn''t do to anthropomorphize too enthusiastically, says Mason Weinrich, executive director of the Whale Center of New England, or to assume that the whales are approaching in order to commune with humans, who historically have been less than excellent company to whales. He says outboard motors sometimes make sounds that are similar frequencies to gray whale vocalizations, and that grays will often approach a boat looking for another whale.
"The stimulus to the whale is generally not contact with people," Weinrich warns. "The whale''s world is an underwater world. You could debate whether they know there are such things as humans on board."
According to several Monterey Bay skippers, California gray whales generally don''t approach vessels playfully anywhere but in their breeding grounds. In wintertime, when they feed in Monterey Bay, they''re all business, focused on storing enough blubber to get through a southward migration.
Heidi Tiura and husband Steph Dutton worked several years on a research project with grays and spent time with the animals in Washington state''s Neah Bay, protesting the Makah Indians'' return to traditional whale hunting. They''ve been running whale watching tours in Monterey Bay since last summer. Never had they seen that kind of friendly behavior from grays--presumably the friendliest of whales--or any other kind of whale.
So in mid-October, when the two had a different group of visitors on the water to look for whales, they were amazed to see humpbacks approach the boat, swim beneath it, cup the hull and spyhop not five feet away, rolling over to look up at them. One did a "headstand," Tiura says, "and stayed there! I got a picture of it, and the most amazing thing is that usually when you see a picture of a fluke, there''s water cascading off it. Well, this was dry because it had been out of the water for so long. Twice it did that."
"We never have seen that type of ''friendly'' behavior," Tiura says, "and I put friendly in quotes because what it really is, for sure, is curious behavior about us."
Two other such encounters followed that first one.
Tiura is an energetic woman with ruddy skin, green eyes, infectious enthusiasm and a New Age streak wide enough to allow for poetic interpretation to drive through. "A friend of ours, Frank Cipriano, does DNA testing on whale meat sold in Japan," she says, "and I showed him the photos, and he just took the quietest breath and smiled and said, ''They''re changing. It''s like the change that happened with the gray whales once we stopped hunting them.''
"Doesn''t that give you goosebumps?"
Change in Behavior
The humpback whale, or Megaptera novaeangliae, is one of the baleen whales, meaning it takes gulps of water teeming with krill or anchovies and strains out the water through fine plates of bone. At 45-50 feet long and about that many tons--and a slow swimmer to boot--it was prized for its meat and blubber and hunted relentlessly in all the world''s oceans until it received protection from the International Whaling Commission in 1966.
Twenty years later, the IWC banned all commercial whaling, and the worldwide humpback population, now at about 20,000, is recovering at a nice clip. In 1990, the Olympia, Wash.-based Cascadia Research Collective counted 500 humpbacks in Monterey Bay. This year they put the population at twice that.
Though the close-encounter experience is new to Tiura and Dutton, some Monterey Bay captains, like Leon Oliver, say they''ve been seeing it for the past several years. Oliver, who captains Magnum Force for Monterey Sport Fishing and Whale Watching Cruises, says he started seeing friendly humpbacks two or three years ago and encounters one maybe once every 14 trips.
Danny Frank, captain of the Star of Monterey for Monterey Bay Whale Watch, says it happened to him a handful of times last summer. It happened again recently for a rare two and a half hours, but before last year, he''d only heard of it happening.
"I think they''re just curious, myself," Frank figures. "And it depends on how you drive around them. You have to get the whales comfortable. I shut down when I see them underneath me on the fathometer.
"I don''t know if it''s new or anything," he finishes, "but it is really exciting."
"It is a change in behavior," says Alan Baldridge, a retired Hopkins Marine Station librarian, who, along with his wife Sheila, was the guest of honor at the American Cetacean Society''s recent convention in Monterey. "Humpbacks have gotten more numerous and they''ve gotten more comfortable with the vessels. There are boats out virtually every day, so I suppose one could argue that, as the season advances, the whales get more used to them. They may even recognize the sound of the same boats--but that is speculation."
Cipriano''s working theory--that the humpbacks'' emboldened behavior is due to the cessation of hunting--has support among the whale cognoscenti.
Nancy Black is a biologist and whale researcher with Monterey Bay Whale Watch. She assists Cascadia Research in identifying individual humpbacks as they migrate from northern California through Monterey Bay en route to their wintering grounds off the coast of mainland Mexico. (There are many other populations and migration routes, as well, the most famous being the Alaska-Hawaii group.) Black says the friendly behavior, though not necessarily new, is becoming more common. "It''s been happening more and more because the whale numbers are increasing and they''re not being harmed," she says. "Most of these whales have never known what it''s like to be hunted."
Ratcheting up the stakes
They probably won''t learn anytime soon, either. But other species are re-learning quickly--or have never forgotten. Both Norway and Japan disregard the IWC''s moratorium on commercial whaling. Norway never accepted it in the first place and has continued whaling all along. Japan avails itself of a loophole in the moratorium permitting the killing of whales for scientific research. Whale meat is sold in Japanese markets, officials claim, to offset the cost of the research.
And an extensive research program it is.
On Nov. 17 three whaling ships, a research vessel and a spotter set sail from Japan for Antarctica intent on catching 400 minke whales. This past summer, the nation added Bryde''s and sperm whales to its research menu, ratcheting up the stakes in the international game of whale conservation politics. The addition has prompted the USA to consider sanctions against Japan. Before he leaves office, President Clinton is expected to have made a decision.
Even more significant are the changes taking place within the whaling commission itself. In its effort to gain a voting majority on the commission--which has morphed over the years from industry overseer to a conservation committee--Japan is garnering support from small Caribbean nations in exchange for aid packages. And IWC Secretary Dr. Ray Gambell was quoted in the news this past summer saying that if the commission doesn''t modify its moratorium on whaling to allow at least limited commercial activity, it risks becoming irrelevant. It could even lose its responsibilities to a less conservation-minded agency.
Cascadia Research biologist John Calambokidis has been studying humpbacks since 1986. He suspects that given their impressive recovery, there will be a move soon to delist them. "Certainly if that happens," he says, "it''s going to open the door to some activities that are not friendly to the whales."
That could reverse the trend in friendly humpback behavior, which was slow to develop in the first place. Calambokidis says that for the first six years that he studied the animals, his group observed no friendly behavior from the humpbacks. Then, in 1992, that changed. "The increase," he says, "was very dramatic and unambiguous. I attribute it to the fact that the animals are not being killed or threatened, which has enabled them to express their curiosity."
Calambokidis has observed a gregarious humpback exhibiting friendly behavior on one day, and returning the next with individuals that seem reticent at first, but eventually warm up and start checking out the boat on their own. "So what you might see is a sense spreading through the population that boats are safe and people are safe," he says, "whereas in the ''60s, an animal doing that activity had a good chance of getting itself killed."
In 1992, the year he and his cohorts started noticing the change in humpback behavior, Calambokidis had a mind-blowing experience. He was in a 16-foot inflatable boat off the coast of Santa Barbara observing migrating humpbacks, when one of the animals got underneath the boat (which at that moment must have seemed a very flimsy thing) and hovered there belly-up, spreading its pectoral fins out on either side of the craft. Then it swam under the boat again and very gently lifted it out of the water on its back, raising the front of the boat with its fluke. That happened to him on two occasions.
"I was kind of torn between taking notes and just enjoying it," Calambokidis recalls. "In one encounter, I ended up leaving the area and thinking it wasn''t safe, then stopping and returning after realizing I couldn''t get myself to leave."
Asked if the awesome experience overwhelmed his scientific sensibilities, Calambokidis pauses. "There is one slightly mysterious part," he concedes. "We''ve ID''d over 1,000 humpbacks along the California coast, and over 15 years of research we''ve seen each individual over a dozen times. There are only a very few individuals that we haven''t seen multiple times.
"The two animals that initiated this series in ''92 are animals that we hadn''t seen before and haven''t seen since. That''s the one mysterious part for me," he adds. "There are very few animals we''ve only seen once, and to have the animals that initiated it be two of these..."
Calambokidis laughs a little self-consciously. "I don''t have an explanation for that."