Whoa!
Get ready for the cloak.
There it goes.
Oh, my god.
There's your whale.
There's my whale!
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I love whales.
You can see a depiction of a whale
from almost every spot in my apartment.
My entire shower curtain is whales.
I used to love to walk around the New England
Aquarium holding a humpback whale vertebra
and talk to patrons about how it was porous
and would have been filled with oil
to help keep the gigantic whale buoyant out in the ocean.
I was a volunteer there.
I wasn't just a crazy person walking around
with animal parts.
I just wanted to clarify that.
But I hadn't actually seen a whale out
in the wild until last spring when
I went camping with my friend Hanna,
and we saw one swimming off the coast.
Wow.
That is so cool.
So I had kind of a rough start to 2018 lab-wise,
and I had a whole bunch of impending deadlines.
So when Hanna suggested that we go on some kind of mystery
adventure last month, I kind of hemmed and hawed about
whether or not I had time to actually go somewhere
for a day.
But when she told me that she wanted to go whale watching,
I said yes immediately.
So we packed up pretty early one morning,
and we drove down to Monterey.
So we saw a ton of animals.
We saw seals, and we saw sea otters,
and then we saw hundreds of dolphins surrounding our boat.
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Some of them were Risso's dolphins,
which I had never seen before, with round, almost flat faces
rather than the typical long noses that we
think of on dolphins.
They were almost cute, unlike normal dolphins,
who are beautiful jerks.
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But then the reason that I was there--
humpbacks.
The first one we saw was pretty far away.
It was just a tail descending into the ocean
and then a surprisingly pungent odor in the air
from a blast from the blowhole.
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Then there were more, a group of three close and lingering
at the surface.
They were absolutely beautiful.
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And then suddenly, the boat took off,
racing away to find some distantly reported orcas.
And honestly, I was kind of disappointed,
because I was way more excited about the humpbacks
than the orcas.
We came across two groups of orcas,
and I will admit that the small one was pretty endearing.
But then out from the corner of my eye,
I saw a whale flipper slap the surface near the orcas.
There was a humpback there, too.
Now, humpbacks have a reputation for interfering
with orca hunts.
There are reports of them helping seals out of the water
during orca attacks, protecting whale calves
of both their own and other species,
and even reports of them helping divers away from sharks.
Our guide noted that the day before, they
had witnessed a humpback trying to protect a gray whale
calf from a group of orcas.
One study looked at 115 documented cases
of humpbacks interacting with orcas over the course of about
62 years.
The study suggested that the humpbacks responded
to the hunting vocalizations of the killer whales
even before they knew which species was being attacked,
theirs or another.
This rushing to the scene of the hunt
may have evolved as an instinct to protect
young of their own species, though the researchers said
that more work would be needed to investigate the underlying
drivers of this behavior.
Now, from our vantage point on the boat,
it's impossible for me to know exactly what was happening
the day that we went out.
But it is possible that that humpback was trying
to interfere with an orca hunt.
It was pretty incredible to see and be so close to.
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Thanks, as always, to all of you for watching, and to my Patreon
patrons for supporting me making these kinds of videos.
Let me know in the comments down below if you also
have a favorite marine mammal.
I do believe that humpback whales are probably
my favorites.
But seeing a narwhal in the wild is on my bucket list
and has been for a while.
So that's going to be hard.
But one day-- one day, it will happen.
Go forth and do science.