Morgan’s First (Successful) Whale Watch

My wonderful husband Morgan loves to tease me and knows he can always punch my hot buttons when he makes fun of my interests in ecology, conservation, and wildlife. So when I started planning our February 2008 trip to Maui, he pretended blasé disinterest. When I told friends I couldn’t wait to set eyes upon the humpback whales – creatures I’d been longing to see in their winter playground ever since I learned about their migration habits back in elementary school (I’m 42 now!) – he would shrug and say, “Ah, you’ve seen one big fish, you’ve seen 'em all,” shooting me a mischievous sidelong look.

Two plus years of marriage have taught me not to rise to the bait. My inner schoolteacher – or maybe she’s my inner encyclopedia fact-checker, I’m not sure – clamped her lips shut on the outgraged “Whales aren’t fish!” that she wanted to shoot back. And as far as seen one, seen 'em all…he was entitled to a bit of cynicism, since we hadn't seen a single whale on our previous attempt at whalewatching last summer.

The whalewatching part of our trip began officially on Thursday evening. While I was diving Molokini and Turtle Arches, Morgan had remained behind in California, slaving away for his corporate masters for a few more days. He finally flew to Maui after work on Wednesday and slept in Thursday morning while I went on yet another dive excursion. And so our sunset cruise aboard Ocean Voyager, a whalewatch boat run by The Pacific Whale Foundation out of Maalea harbor, was Morgan’s first taste of the humpbacks I’d been raving about on the phone every night when I called him.

I had our binoculars around my neck, and he carried our Nikon D200 with a 70-300 mm zoom lens. We boarded the big boat and took spots in the almost bleacher-like seats on the bow, and as we watched the ocean on the other side of the breakwater that forms the tiny harbor, a whale breached just a couple of hundred feet away.



It happened in a flash. A huge, dark, submarine-shaped creature broke the surface of the beautiful blue water. It soared into the air at about a 70-degree angle until it’s entire 40-foot-long body except for its tail flukes was visible. Water cascaded from its form, flowing down the beautiful dark creases of its white throat and belly, glittering like icing on the frilly margin of tubercles crenellating its fifteen-foot-long pectoral fins. Then it fell back into the water with a monumental splash, twisting around and landing on its back. White foam spewed thirty feet into the air, and everyone who had been looking in that direction surged to their feet with a gasp and a cry of “Look at that!” or “Over there!” or “Did you see that?!”

Everyone.





Including my supposedly jaded and blasé husband, who had peeled the lens cap off the camera and was holding it up, trained on the now smooth spot in the water where the whale had vanished. Farther out towards the horizon another whale breached, and then off to our left, a few hundred yards from where the first breaching humpback had disappeared, another whale rolled on the surface, smacking its pectoral fins in a frenzy of splashing.

All that before we even got out of the harbor.

Our big motorized catamaran soon pulled out of the harbor and we were free to wander the decks, munching on appetizers and sipping mai tais and soft drinks. Everyone on board, Morgan included, was pointing and gasping and oohing and ahhing almost nonstop. We were surrounded by whales performing their aquatic ballet.

The naturalist on board spoke over the public address system about the lifecycle of the whales and commented on the behaviors we were seeing. The humpbacks we were seeing had spent their summers off the west coast of North America, anywhere from Northern California to the waters off Alaska, feeding on schools of small fish and krill that they swallow by the ton. In autumn they had started migrating to the waters off Maui, where they spend the winter months giving birth to and caring for their calves, or mating. Some had traveled the 3500 miles between their feeding and breeding grounds in as little as 30 days!




On that first whalewatch trip, the whale activity seemed to die down as the sun fell towards the horizon. There were fewer breaches and tail slaps, and many more fluke up dives.

Researchers are able to track individual whales because each has unique markings on their tail flukes, which they typically raise out of the water – and hold in perfect position for photographing – just before they make a deep dive. Researchers and volunteers from the Pacific Whale Foundation count whales and photograph as many flukes as they can every year, and share the information with researchers working on the West Coast of North America to track the humpack population’s health.
The captain motored the boat slowly, often changing direction to either avoid humpbacks that had surfaced nearby, or to check out behavior happening nearby. At one point the captain stopped the boat and let us drift while the crew lowered a hydrophone and we eavesdropped on the singers.



While that first whalewatch was beautiful against the sunset backdrop, the whalewatch we took a few days later out of Lahaina was even more exciting. We were on another of the Pacific Whale Foundation’s boats, and had barely cleared the harbor when a mother whale surfaced nearby and started slapping her tail down on the water. The slaps rang out like cannon shots. The display went on for several minutes, giving us a good chance to get lots of photos. I had to admire the strength and endurance of the whale as she raised her tail – which measured at least 15 feet wide, and must have weighed at least a ton – and brought it down with a majestic splash again and again.

We also saw more close-up breaches, including one male who breached 23 times in a row – the naturalist narrating our journey and answering questions over the public address system said she and the rest of the crew couldn’t remember ever seeing such a persistent breacher!

Morgan gave up trying to be blasé as he and I passed the camera and the binoculars back and forth. We ended up being very glad we had brought extra memory cards. You can see more of our photos taken on our two whalewatch trips at http://picasaweb.google.com/BoomersParents/MauiFebruary2008

I highly recommend that you go whalewatching with the Pacific Whale Foundation next time you are in Maui during whale season. Their snorkeling trip to Molokini and Turtle Arches was also a lot of fun. Purchasing a membership gets you discounts on boat tours and merchandise from their wonderful shop in Maalea. Check out their web site, where you can do everything from reading whalewatch logs to ordering T-shirts to making advance reservations for tours, at http://www.pacificwhale.org/

Hide-and-Seek with an Octopus

[Perhaps you will be relieved to read that this will be the last entry about my diving experiences with the Mike Severns Diving group in Maui in February 2008! I still have to write about some above-the-water whalewatching, though...]

I was about halfway through the dive on the back wall of Molokini, in 65 feet of water admiring a pair of butterfly fish hovering above a small coral head, when Dan the divemaster caught my eye. He waved me over to a coral bommie where most of the other divers were clustered. The bommie was dome-shaped, maybe six feet across and jutting four feet out from the wall, a lovely mass of plate coral, finger coral, lobe coral, and some wire coral. Deep crevices surrounded the area where the bommie was attached to the wall, and Dan pointed into a vertical crack with his flashlight.

There hung a beautiful bright yellow trumpetfish, about three feet long. These amazing ambush predators can hang nearly motionless in the water, hovering with the motions of tiny fins. They can change color at will and orient themselves any which way, from straight horizontal to a diagonal of ten, twenty, thirty, or forty-five degrees, or hang absolutely straight with tail up and horn-shaped mouth down. I’ve seen them blend into branching coral, tag along with a big predatory trevally almost like a remora, and sway softly in a bed of algae. I nodded appreciatively and gave Dan the OK sign to thank him for pointing it out.
He shook his head, wiggled his fingers, and probed the crevice with his light again.
And there behind the trumpetfish was the bright-red form of one of my all-time favorite underwater playmates, an octopus!

I whooped into my regulator and flashed Dan a double-OK sign, powered up my camera, and finned in for a closer view.

This was a small specimen, a little over a foot long from tentacle tip to the top of its blobby head. Hanging onto the side of a rock with a few tentacles, it peered at me with its intelligent eyes as it wound and unwound the rest of its sucker-studded tentacle tips. Cringing a bit – I’m a novice underwater photographer and don’t know much about the effects of electronic photo flashes on the sensitive eyes of my friends in the deep – I framed a shot and pressed the shutter.

Click, flash. The octopus shrank back deeper into the crevice, paused a moment, then came floating back out towards me. It wrapped a couple of blood-red tentacles around the rock above and pulled itself up, and I went with it, snapping pictures and laughing.

We played hide-and-seek for several minutes, the octopus oozing into a crevice too narrow for my fingers to follow (even had I been foolish enough to want to), then peering back out at me with only its eyes visible. I sank lower in the water and it came out of its hiding place. I finned up until we were eye to eye and popped off another shot, and the octopus stretched its legs behind it and squirted water like a jet through its siphon to swim several feet away, then settled back onto the bommie.

It crawled around the front edge and I slid around the side. It caught sight of me – it’s pretty much impossible to sneak up on something with such a flexible body and amazing eyesight – and oozed into another crevice. Its eyes came out of the crack like independent creatures, and then two tentacles unfurled and grabbed hold of a rock. It pulled itself out of its hidey-hole with a fluid motion, oozed over some open ground, and sank behind a bulge of coral.

I finned closer, suddenly aware that all the other divers in my party had moved on, and waited until the octopus’s eyes appeared above the bulge again. They ducked down and appeared again and again, each time coming a little higher, like a nervous cartoon character’s.

I took one last picture and waved goodbye, and reluctantly finned off towards the bubbles of my other human companions a few yards down the wall.

If I ever find my misplaced CD of photos from the trip, I will post one or two of my octopus photos!

An Odd Highlight for a Wall Dive: Slipper Lobsters in Action!

[Continuing my diving adventures in February 2008 off Maui with Mike Severns Diving.]

Molokini Crater lies a couple miles southwest of Maui. An extinct vent of the massive Haleakala volcano that comprises about two-thirds of the island of Maui, the crater walls only enclosed three-quarters of a circle that measures about 1800 feet across. The crater formed as hot ash spewed into the air about 230,000 years ago – it was all above water back then – and was pushed by the steady trade winds to form the crater walls, with a permanent gap facing into the steady winds.

Now a good portion of the crescent-moon-shaped crater, the cliffs of which rise only about 160 feet above the surface, is underwater. The submerged rocky walls themselves have been overgrown with corals and sponges and the many lifeforms that live upon them, and the interior of the crater is filled with coral outcroppings and the sand formed by coral’s decay. The interior of the crater has a number of moorings used by both diving and snorkeling boats, but some of the best diving is in the deep water – you don’t hit bottom until about 300 feet – around the curved back side of Molokini.

The wall is nearly vertical. Holes and cracks ranging from fist-sized to twenty feet long run vertically, horizontally, and every degree in between. Surf washes up against the rock in a perpetual tumble of turquoise and white. There are no moorings on this side, so when you’re diving, you gear up, wait for the okay, and jump over the side of the boat when the captain says “Go.” You plunge into deep blue water that’s refreshingly cool after standing in the sun in your thin wetsuit, pop to the surface, give the “OK” sign to the guys still on the boat, and kick away from the boat towards the wall. The other divers make their entries and you all group up on the surface, do one last equipment check, and submerge.

The boat “stays live,” motoring and drifting along, keeping our bubbles in sight as we descend to eighty feet. Over the rumble of the motor, which cuts in and out as Andy maneuvers the boat to stay within easy pick-up distance at the end of our dive, I hear the low, elongated moans and whoops of a nearby male humpback. Glancing down to the sandy bottom some 220 feet below me, I watch a white tip reef shark working its way along the crater wall until it vanishes into the murky blue.

I glide along the wall, admiring the coral formations that jut from the underlying rock and playing hide-and-seek with the fish and moray eels tucked into their sheltering crevices. I keep an eye on the other divers strung like a line before and behind me, and we point out to each other particularly beautiful or interesting sights: a pair of fountain shrimp advertising their cleaning services, a bright yellow trumpetfish that must be three feet long hanging suspended dead-center in a vertical crack, a yellow-margin moray eel ribboning its way from hiding spot to hiding spot through stubby branches of finger coral. I check my depth gauge with near paranoid frequency, knowing how easy it is to lose track of one’s depth on a wall with visibility at 200 feet like this. And I spin around like an underwater dervish to stare out at the deep blue water, hoping for another glimpse of a white tip reef shark, or a passing humpback, or – that Holy grail of all divers – a whale shark.

Turning back from one of these perusals of the deep, I notice one of my fellow divers hovering to my left and maybe fifteen feet above me, semaphoring his long arms wildly over his head to get my attention. I make eye contact and decide he’s not out of air or in some other emergency situation. I start running through my catalog of hand signals for cool critters he might have seen: the waving fingers of an octopus, the hand-on-head-like-a-dorsal-fin that signifies shark, the little pinky wave that says shrimp, the flapping arms that mimic the majestic wings of a manta ray.

Shaking his head emphatically, he points with both hands to something on the wall just beneath him. I fin over and up, scanning the wall curiously, and am totally WOWWED by the vision of two slipper lobsters – the animal in it’s entirety looks just like the meaty tail of the succulent Maine lobsters I grew up on – tearing apart and devouring a red slate pencil sea urchin.
I whoop through my regulator and give my fellow diver the double-OK signs that are the diver equivalent of a surfer’s “awesome, dude!” I snap a couple of pictures and watch in awe as these two slipper lobsters, the urchin trapped between them, take turns reaching nasty-looking pincers into the center of its underside – which is facing up and out towards us, the way the lobsters are holding it – and yank out chunks of meat. The meat vanishes beneath the raised carapace of the lobster, and then the voracious claw is back for more.

While it’s true I feel a twinge of pain and sadness for the sea urchin, this is at the heart of my love of wildlife watching: not just seeing an animal and making a note in a guidebook about the place and date where I encountered it, but really seeing it in action, exhibiting a natural behavior, giving me a glimpse of how it lives its life.

The encounter brought up far more questions than it answered…Had one or both lobsters come upon the urchin hale and hearty and wrestled it into its present predicament? Or had they found the urchin lying upside down, perhaps already partially eaten by some other predator? Were these two lobsters competing? Cooperating?

I’ve seen hundreds of slipper lobsters and other crustaceans all over the world. While some have been bizarrely, almost frighteningly large, I've never considered one to be the highlight of a dive before! Seeing these slipper lobsters in action gave me a whole new perspective and reminded me how little I know about even the simplest organisms I share the planet with.

Turtles Everywhere

[Continuing my diving adventures in February 2008 off Maui with Mike Severns Diving.]

In about forty-five feet of water, a little murky because of its sandy, rubble-strewn bottom, I rounded a compact-car-sized boulder and found myself hovering just above a green sea turtle. About three feet long from slightly hooked beak to tip of tail, the turtle was resting on the bottom, eyes open but apparently asleep. I dropped down to take a couple of photos, then swept around the boulder and found myself in turtle central!

Four green sea turtles even bigger than the one I’d just left rested on the floor to my right, one half-in a crevice and the other three looking like they were trying to squeeze in behind him. Straight ahead a slightly smaller turtle was paddling its patient and graceful way to the surface for a breath of air. To the left three more turtles lay on various humps of coral, a little more spaced out than the ones trying to crowd into the crevice.

Dan, the dive master who had told us on the surface that he always saw at least one turtle here, hung in midwater, grinning around his regulator as he watched us try to figure out which turtle to look at – and photograph – first! As he had promised, the turtles were quite used to divers, and were not disturbed as we eased in for a closer look. Their eyes were open and they followed my clumsy progress as I maneuvered all around them, popping off photos and simply admiring them.

Green sea turtles are the most commonly seen sea turtle species around Maui. Unlike land turtles, sea turtles cannot retract their soft bodyparts – head, four fins, and tail – into their shells for protection. Their front fins are quite long and thick, well-shaped for paddling, and I am always amazed at the grace with which they soar through the water. They can easily outdistance a diver or snorkeler if they are feeling harassed. They’ve been federally protected for three decades now, and like the humpbacks their numbers have made a gradual recovery and are at a healthy 10,000 or so individuals.

Federal protection means it’s illegal to harass a green sea turtle, and for practical purposes, harassment means doing anything that makes them change the behavior they are exhibiting when you encounter them. So we were careful not to touch them or get close enough to inadvertently bump into them, and tried to respect their personal space bubbles as we watched them rest. I tried not to get my camera too close, so that the flash wouldn’t bother their eyes, but I did want to get facial portraits of as many as I could, since I have learned that the markings on the cheek are unique to each turtle and can act as an identifying “fingerprint.”

Dan had mentioned that these turtles seem to have preferred resting spots, and that they will sometimes jealously compete for a prime piece of real estate. If one turtle arrives to find its favorite nap zone already occupied, it may repeatedly bump the snoozer, trying to dislodge it and claim the space for itself. If that fails, it may just lie down right on top of the first turtle! Dan claims he has found turtles stacked three high on some really primo spots.

The turtles on the left had space between them and seemed to be resting happily in their spots, but the ones on the right were definitely in competition for the best position, a flat spot where the lucky possessor could wedge its head and most of its body beneath an overhanging ledge. As I watched, two turtles bumped their shells against that of the guy who’d gotten there first, both trying to muscle in and pry their competition out of its hidey-hole. One of the interlopers gave up fairly quickly, but the other one kept up the harassment, eventually nipping at the half-hidden turtle’s exposed fins and tail with some vicious-looking snaps of its curved beak.

Green sea turtles can go for 20 to 30 minutes on one lungful of air, and only one departed for the surface during the ten or so minutes we were with them. Sometimes they rise and bob along on the surface for a little while, but from the surface you'll often get just a glimpse of a softball-sized head popping up, taking a quick gulp of air, and disappearing again. They eat primarily algae, scraping it off the rocks with their slightly hooked beaks or ripping off big chunks of limu, a seaweed growing in the shallow sandy patches.

They are quite single-minded when eating, and don’t let divers, competing turtles, or anything else distract them from their determined grazing. On an earlier encounter with a single turtle at another dive site, a fellow diver and I landed on the sandy bottom, one on either side, hunkering down so that we were eye to eye with the turtle, who was maybe three feet long. It looked at each of us and went straight back to hooking and gulping strands of limu like it couldn’t care less.

The First Singer

(In February 2008 I spent four wonderful mornings diving with the Mike Severns Diving outfit in Kihei, Maui. Here's a writeup of another of our memorable wildlife encounters.)

We were motoring in towards the southwest shore of Maui, having completed our first dive in Molokini crater, when Andy slowed the boat and craned his neck, peering out over the bow at the water ahead.

Divers, divemaster, and deckhand all lunged to our feet and peered in that direction; this was my second day with the crew, and I knew by now that slowing down probably meant he had spotted whale activity of some sort.

“I think it’s a singer,” he said, pointing ahead of us as he slowed the boat to a dead stop and cut the engine. “I just saw it dive, and I’m pretty sure it’s alone. If I’m right, he’s hanging motionless underwater, with his head lower than his tail, and he’s signing. If we’re quiet, we may be able to hear him.”

We all stood silent as the boat drifted in the direction Andy had seen the whale submerge. At first the predominant noise was the slap of waves on the metal hull, but after a couple of minutes the boat found her groove and the slapping vanished. I heard a phrase of faint, deep moaning that lasted just a few seconds. When I looked around, wondering if my imagination was running away with me – I’d heard recorded whale songs dozens of times in my life – I was pleased to see that others heard it, too.

Andy was nodding excitedly. “Everybody put an ear on the railing,” he said, demonstrating the pose himself.

Somewhat skeptical, I set my ear against one of the round metal pipes that formed a cage-like railing system all around the boat – and heard more moaning, higher-pitched and very distinct. The metal hull of the boat amplified the sound like the body of an acoustic guitar and transmitted it through the railing to our ears. “Hey, Andy, pull the string tighter, I can’t hear so well,” deckhand Jeff joked, referring to the tin-can-and-string “phones” we had all played with as kids.

The sounds were fascinating:

• Long, drawn-out moans at high, medium, and low pitches. The low-pitched ones really reverberated through the boat and into your flesh and bones.
• Short, deep “huh” sounds that made me thing of punctuation marks.
• Short and long squeals that reminded me a bit of recordings of dolphins, but seemed a bit lower-pitched and more drawn out to my untrained ear.
• Noises I can only describe as “bubbly” – the sort of “glub glub” effect you get if you try to speak with your mouth underwater in a swimming pool.

The sounds got louder as we drifted over the singer, then started to fade as we drifted past him and away. When Andy was sure we were a safe distance past the singer, he started the boat and motored slowly away. We had listened for about fifteen minutes, and the song would go on for another five to ten minutes.

Although female humpbacks issue short vocalizations, only the males of the species sing, and they only do it when they are here in their Hawaiian islands breeding waters. Researchers don’t know if every male of breeding age does it, but many do. They also don’t know what prompts them to start, or why they sometimes sing over and over again and other times take breaks in between.

Remember singing “Row Row Row Your Boat” in school when you were a kid? The teacher would divide up the class into three groups, and group one would start whie group two would wait and start with “Row, row, row” as the first group began “Merrily, merrily…”, and then group three would join in later stil? The whale singing is like that, but far less organized!

Being underwater or listening through a hydrophone, you often hear several males singing simultaneously. They are all singing the same song, but in a “round,” so that the first phrases of one singer overlay the second chorus of another and the fifth of yet another.

There is one song for the season, and all males sing that song, with one of them occasionally making a change that all the other singers then immediately pick up on and incorporate into their songs. Nobody knows why they introduce these changes. The changes accumulate over the season, which runs from January through May, and by the time the whales leave the Hawaiian islands to go feed in the waters off Alaska, the song has changed considerably. When the first hydrophone picks up the first singer next year, he’ll be singing exactly the song that they left off with at the end of the 2008 season, and over the course of the season, other males will introduce changes so that it’s a different song by the end of the 2009 season.

The noise carries for miles; other whales, with their highly attuned hearing, can hear it for at least 25 miles around, while we mere humans, when submerged, can pick up the tune broadcast my a male some five to seven miles away. Scientists are sure it has to do with breeding, but they have yet to fully explain the meanings of the songs. It could be anything from advertising his presence to showing off his fitness for mating – we may never know the true meaning to another whale.

Close Encounter with Humpback Whales

(In February 2008 I spent four wonderful mornings diving with the Mike Severns Diving outfit in Kihei, Maui. Here's a writeup of one of our memorable wildlife encounters, which happened before I even got my gear on!)

During Captain Andy’s introduction talk aboard the Pi’iili Kai, he went over all the usual safety stuff, pointed out various features of the boat – the side gates we would giant-stride out of, the stern ladders we’d use to get back onto the boat at the end of the dive -- and ran through what the day would probably be like. Then he said our first dive would be out at Molokini crater. “Usually it takes us 15 minutes to motor out there,” he said. “But this is humpback season, so it could take us a lot longer!”

Whales have right of way around Maui, which is the center of the Humpback National Marine Sanctuary. Also, since the humpback is both on the Endangered Species List and protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, people are supposed to give the humpbacks a wide berth – 100 yards, by law. “Sometimes these guys pop up right in front of the boat with no warning and I have to slam on the brakes,” Andy warned us. “It’s like having a three-year-old run out in front of your car.”

So it was no surprise to any of us that, five minutes into our cruise between Kihei boat ramp and Molokini, we were veering off course to avoid a small pod comprising mom, calf, and escort. Our veer took us closer to another pod, though, just as one of them started doing pectoral slaps. Andy cut the engine and we drifted, watching the 40-something foot long beast roll back and forth on the calm surface of the ocean, repeatedly flinging one 15-foot-long front flipper skyward and then bring it down on the water with a resounding smack. White water fountained up around the graceful pectoral fin each time it plunged into the sea, and cascaded off it again as the pec rose for another slap.

The long pectoral fins are relatively narrow and look thin compared to the animal they are attached to. Dark on the upper side, white beneath, they are rounded at the tips and have a lacy crenellation around the edges, which often carry barnacles the size of a toddler’s fist.
After a few slaps another pec – this one belonging to another 40-something-foot-long leviathan – rose into the air and smacked down, doubling both the sound and the whitewater fury of the display. The first humpback brought its second pectoral fin into play, rolling rapidly back and forth, smacking down first one, then the other, as though to outdo its competition. The only other sound was the occasional blast of a humpback expelling a breath at 300 miles per hour through the paired blowholes, or nostrils, on top of its head.

We drifted for five or ten minutes, and the pectoral slapping display showed no signs of abating as Andy started the engine and turned us again towards our dive spot. Researchers suspect the slapping is a form of communication between humpbacks – the sound carries for quite a distance both above and below water – but what it really means is for the whales to know and us to wonder.