Steve Perez, a freelancer with Examiner.com, recently posted this great video from his whale-watching excursion with Birch Aquarium at Scripps naturalists.
Let us know what you think!
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By Caitlin Scully, Birch Aquarium whale naturalist  Fin whale in front of Los Coronados Islands. Photo by Caitlin Scully
The final weeks of the whale-watching season brought few gray whales. In fact, we saw hardly any! The grays were few and far between and were often juveniles. It may be the adults had already passed San Diego on their way back north, or they were further off shore. However, that does not mean there were no whales. In fact, we saw fin whales nearly every day. Large rorquals (a class of baleen whales) like fin whales are usually solitary. However, we saw many fin whales feeding in close proximity. They would come to the surface, take a few breaths, then arch their back and make a deep dive to presumably feed on krill or small fish. The fin whales ignored our boat and continued to feed. There were many times we’d be looking for the whale to reappear, and it would pop up right next to us! With fin whales, we often hear their strong exhalation before we see them. Sometimes they were so close that we’d feel the mist from their blows. Needless to say, the entire boat yelled with excitement. It’s always amazing to think that fin whales are the second largest animals alive today, behind the blue whale. For most passengers on our whale-watching excursions, these whales are the largest living things they will see in their life.  Our whale naturalists spot a blue whale, the largest animal on Earth. Photo by Caitlin Scully. One amazing morning we saw something never seen before from the Marietta – a blue whale! Blue whales are unusual to see off our coast this time of year. At first we thought it was another fin whale, but its behavior, dorsal fin, and the shape of its blow led us to think otherwise. Our captain was so excited! We all were! Blue whales are the largest animals to ever live on Earth, including during the time of the dinosaurs. The largest blue whale recorded was 111 feet long, about one-third the length of a football field. Our blue was not that long but definitely made our usual gray whales look small! Such an unusual sight was a spectacular way to end of our whale-watching season. On behalf of everyone at Birch Aquarium at Scripps, San Diego Harbor Excursion, and our wonderful volunteers, we want thank everyone who joined us on the boats this year. It was truly a wonderful whale-watching season, made all the better by the encounters we shared together. We look forward to next year! It may only be March, but Birch Aquarium at Scripps is getting into the summer-camp swing! Registration is now open for our Summer Learning Adventure Camps, which run from June 28-August 27. Visit our website to download a full summer camp brochure and register online! For ocean-loving kids ages 4-15, our accredited camps merge scientific exploration with hands-on fun and learning. Campers experience live animal encounters, hands-on activities, and field excursions for an entire week or just a day. Camps feature amazing ocean creatures, myths of the sea, gooey dissections, the remarkable world of sharks, adventures in oceanography, the chance to learn how to surf and snorkel, and more! Our camps are accredited by the American Camp Association, meaning that Birch Aquarium at Scripps meets more than 300 quality standards and provides a safe and nurturing environment for campers. This year, we’re also partnering with Kits Included Together, a nationwide program that provides the staff of summer-camp programs with training and support for including children with and without disabilities. It’s shaping up to be a fantastic summer! We look forward to celebrating the ocean with your children this year. By Caitlin Scully, Birch Aquarium whale naturalist  A gray whale heads north. Photo by Caitlin Scully.
The northbound migration is in full swing! In the last few weeks, adult grays have begun moving north, away from their birthing and breeding lagoons on the Baja Peninsula, toward their feeding grounds in the Arctic. So far, the gray whales have been adults and juveniles – no mothers and calves yet. The whales have been very active and social while migrating north, a contrast to their behavior heading south. We have seen large groups of eight to 12 adults moving together, as well as many grays traveling in groups of two to four. Our passengers were elated to see the whales rolling, mating, spy-hopping, splashing, and breaching. Not only have we seen the grays interacting with other types of whales and dolphins, but they’ve also been traveling with them! Grays were seen traveling with a group of humpback whales, as well as interacting with pods of Risso’s dolphins, Pacific white-sided dolphins, and oceanic bottlenose dolphins.  A Risso's dolphin breaches during a whale-watching excursion. Photo by Caitlin Scully. For the first time this season we have also seen groups of different types of dolphins interacting near our boat. On one exceptional day, both common dolphins and Pacific white-sided dolphins rode the bow wave of The Marietta simultaneously. One week we saw a large pod of Risso’s dolphins nearly every day. This group was made up of adults and juveniles and they were very active: jumping, flinging kelp in the air, and breaching. This is very unusual behavior for the usually stoic Risso’s. Whale watching ends April 4, so you have a few more weeks left to witness this amazing migration. We continue to vigilantly watch for the first mother and calf pair heading north. Steve Perez, a freelancer with Examiner.com, recently posted this glimpse into our new exhibit, There’s Something About Seahorses. In the video, executive director Nigella Hillgarth also talks about the reasons she loves this wonderful animals. Let us know what you think! By Caitlin Scully, Birch Aquarium whale naturalist  Fin Whale. Photo courtesy of NOAA. This was an exciting week off the coast of San Diego. Overall there was exceptional diversity: We saw gray whales, fin whales, bottlenose dolphins, Pacific white sided dolphins, common dolphins, mola mola, bait fish, and a blue shark! Unfortunately, we also saw an injured whale that may have been hit by a ship earlier in its migration. The gray whales continue their southbound migration. We witnessed fast whales, slow whales, juvenile whales, and adults. One day we saw a small juvenile breach three times. We also saw a fin whale feeding about 10 miles offshore. Fin whales are the second-largest animal on Earth behind blue whales. They can grow up to 88 feet long, almost twice the size of gray whales and almost as long as our 94-foot whale-watching boat. The whale stayed very close to the boat and swam directly underneath us. While further offshore, we also saw a blue shark. It is unusual to see sharks on our whale-watching cruises, and this shark passed right by the boat! Blue sharks grow up to seven feet long and can travel long distances to find fish and squid in their open-ocean habitat.  Birch Aquarium at Scripps naturalists spotted this injured gray whale during a whale-watching cruise in February 2010. Photo by Rebekah Bohm. Sadly, this week we also saw a gray whale that had been injured on its migration. This adult whale was traveling in the company of two others and was swimming very slowly. The whale’s natural predators – orca or killer whales – may have caused the injury or a ship may have hit the whale. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researcher said the wound did not look recent, so it was unlikely that it had been injured near San Diego. Unfortunately, ship strikes are a real danger for many types of whales and often neither the ship captain nor the whale realizes it is in the wrong place until it is too late. Hopefully the whale will make it to the lagoons where it can have time to heal before the long migration north. Last weekend, Birch Aquarium at Scripps took a group on our first trip this season to the whales’ Baja California birthing and feeding lagoons (see video here). All of the guests interacted with and touched adult and juvenile gray whales. We also saw a lot of whales in the distance, as their mothers were too cautious to bring their calves closer to the boats. By the end of the season, however, the calves will be confident enough to interact with the boats under their mother’s watchful eye. Some of the highlights we witnessed on the trip were seeing the gray whales mating as well as a calf play with a strand of kelp. It is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Birch Aquarium naturalists are traveling in Baja with a second group until Sunday. We can’t wait to hear stories of what they witnessed! Our final Baja trip takes place March 24-28. Visit our whale-watching page for more information.  A pair of gray whales travel south to Baja California. Photo by Catilin Scully. By Caitlin Scully, Birch Aquarium whale naturalist February 1-7Whales are everywhere! Each day we’ve had consistent views of whales near the boat as well as in the distance. This week we witnessed mating, breaching, and of course, slow and steady migration. Many of the whales have been easy to watch. They are not moving erratically nor showing discomfort at the presence of the boat. This was surprising, as there were several naval warships nearby every day. There is exciting news about the dolphins we’ve been seeing. Normally, we encounter bottlenose dolphins, common dolphins, as well as Pacific white-sided dolphins. This week we were lucky enough to come upon Risso’s dolphins, one of the larger members of the dolphin family known for their distinctive body markings. These illusive dolphins are normally found further offshore. Did you know that Scripps Oceanography produces an award-winning e-magazine called explorations? The bi-monthly publication showcases the groundbreaking research of Scripps scientists. In addition to written articles, the e-magazine features video and audio podcasts, image galleries, and a special Q&A section for kids. It’s the perfect resource to learn about Scripps and the important work that we do all around the world! The feature story this month follows the efforts of well-known Scripps climate researcher Veerabhadran Ramanathan as he strives to improve cooking methods in the developing world – changes that could slow global warming and improve public health.  Seen from space, smog collects at the base of the Himalayas before drifting toward the Bay of Bengal. Photo: NASA Below is a glimpse of this fascinating story. Read the entire version and watch the podcast here. You can also sign up to receive the bi-monthly newsletter by email. Enjoy! Clearing the AirJanuary/February 2010 By Robert Monroe Smoke rises from a clay stove and blackens the walls of a poorly ventilated kitchen hut somewhere in south Asia. The smoke eventually escapes and adds to a perpetual haze that darkens the horizons over large swaths of poverty-filled regions. The smoke continues to rise. Its floating soot particles heat the atmosphere as they absorb sunlight and at the same time, they may also cool things at ground level with the dimness they provide. The soot and other forms of black carbon eventually fall back to the ground, having traveled as far as the Himalayas. Onto this bright snow and ice they add a veneer of blackness that hastens melt rates and diminishes glacial stores of drinking water. The practice of biomass burning – using sticks, grass, or cow dung as free cooking fuel – combines with the production of diesel exhaust from vehicles everywhere to create a large contributor to global warming, possibly second only to carbon dioxide emissions. By accelerating snowmelt, it makes the planet more heat-absorbent as sunlight falls less on the bright ice and snow and more on dark land and water.  Returning to his grandmother's town of Eraharam, India and a traditional cookstove, Ramanathan says he hopes his grandchild's generation will have a safer way to cook. This smog, of course, has other unpleasant side effects carbon dioxide doesn’t have. The women using crude cookstoves and the children at their feet are first in line to suffer from respiratory problems every time they prepare a meal. Household black carbon emissions have been estimated to cause 2 million or more premature deaths throughout the developing world every year. Even with the smog control efforts in urban areas of the developed world, pollution continues to affect health even in relatively affluent countries. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of climate and atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, was one of those children. Spending summers with his grandmother in the village of Eraharam in southern India, he would watch her wheeze through the cooking hour, preparing dishes with a delicious smoky flavor infused at great cost. Ramanathan grew up to be a scientist who was among the first to understand on a regional and global scale how particulate pollution can simultaneously attenuate and accelerate global warming. His career tracks neatly with the growth of public awareness of climate change and the dangers it poses to the planet. Now his newest project is informed as much by memory as by data. Read more. By Caitlin Scully, Birch Aquarium whale naturalist  Birch Aquarium naturalists witnessed this juvenile gray whale breaching during a whale-watching excursion in January 2010. Photo by Caitlin Scully.
January 25-31The week after the big storm turned out to be quite interesting. Early in the week we got news that a dead humpback whale had been spotted off the coast of San Diego. Our whale-watching cruises did not venture to see it, but had we gone, we may have seen some of the ocean’s top predators in action: Southern California species of oceanic sharks such as great whites, makos, thresher, blues, and oceanic white tips. As for living whales, we had our record whale-sighting day this week. On Sunday, we saw 28 whales in one day! All were gray whales. Some were in small groups making their way down to the lagoons, some were mothers and calves, and many were juveniles. Juvenile grays have been a common sight the last few weeks. Many adult whales have made it down to the lagoons – they are in more of a rush to give birth and to mate. On the contrary, juvenile grays are no longer accompanied by their mother and are not of reproductive age and size, which occurs between six and 11 years old.  Birch Aquarium naturalists spotted a unique whale with distinct, uncharacteristic, upturned tail flukes during a whale-watching excursion in January 2010. Photo by Caitlin Scully. With increased numbers of juveniles we have also witnessed more breaches. This season has been record breaking with the amount of breaching grays we have seen. On Saturday we saw one juvenile breach four times just outside of San Diego Bay! It was great. We saw a unique individual this week. One adult gray had distinct, uncharacteristic, upturned tail flukes. This whale would be great to study, as it is easily recognizable. In the world of cetacean (whales and dolphins) research, identifying individuals is incredibly difficult. These animals spend most of their life underwater, and when they reach the surface, they show themselves for a precious few seconds. Cetacean researches use the notches and “nics” on the flukes and dorsal fin to identify individuals. Many researchers have massive stores of identification photos to sort through in order to identify a single whale or dolphin. Why do they bother? Well, it is important to understand the movements of different animals in regards to migration, feeding habits, and seasonal patterns. I am very curious to know if any other gray whale researchers have kept track of this distinctive gray whale. By Caitlin Scully, Birch Aquarium whale naturalist January 11-17We had yet another great week of whale watching aboard the Marietta. Mid-January brought warm weather, calm seas, and a consistent flow of southbound gray whales. Migrating grays were not the only spectacular site – we saw common dolphins, pacific white-sided dolphins, and Mola mola!  Mola mola. Courtesy of NOAA What is a Mola mola, you ask? Also known as an ocean sunfish, a Mola mola is a large oceanic fish that looks like a fish head with fins on the top and bottom. The largest Mola mola ever recorded was 10 feet long and weighed 4,927 pounds! These animals are not strong swimmers; they drift with the currents to find their primary food of jellies. One of our favorite facts to share with guests on the whale cruises is that a Mola mola is one of the few types of fish that are unable to close their mouths. They are definitely a unique and exciting encounter on the Pacific! In regards to our gray whales, we were lucky to witness more breaches this week. This is a wonderful treat; breaches are rare and exciting. Lately, we have been seeing adult whales breach while in groups. It is likely that these whales were “flirting” on their way down to the birthing and breeding lagoons in Baja California. Another great encounter was spotting a mother and calf. Sometimes, mother grays with young calves are skittish around boats. If a mother whale begins to push her calf away from a boat, dives deep and surfaces in a different direction, or begins to get agitated, we know she does not want us to spend time near her and we move on to find other whales. However, this mother remained calm and we were able to follow her at a distance for nearly an hour! The calf was quite small; we guess it was about one week old. We also saw more common dolphins, pacific white-sided dolphins, and bottlenose dolphins. There must be lots of bait fish about two miles out of San Diego Bay because we see the white-sided dolphins fishing nearly every day. Overall this was another good week out on the water.  A Navy ship and gray whale pass each other near San Diego Bay. Photo by Caitlin Scully January 18-24This blog entry will be shorter than usual, as winter’s El Niño event brought some of the strongest storms Southern California has seen in the last decade. Our cruises do not run during storms. El Niño occurs when seawater temperature is unusually high along the entire Equatorial Pacific Ocean. This is atypical; usually the Eastern Equatorial Pacific has cool water. El Niño affects the entire Pacific Ocean. Locally, El Niño events cause increased storms and rainfall. This week, the ocean was too rough to venture out of San Diego Bay and the rain was record breaking. The gray whales were still migrating tenaciously southward through the storm – they have to make it to the lagoons! We were finally able to cruise out of the Bay on Sunday and witnessed gray whales continue to migrate. |
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