Whale Watching 2023

The Moeller clan gathered on Cape Cod for a week again this year. They went whale watching out of Provincetown on the Dolphin Fleet twice. The whales put on a really good show both times.

The boat took us out to the Stellwagen Bank to look for the whales. We mostly saw Humpback whales feeding, but apparently there were Minke whales on the perimeter. I did not get any Minke whale pictures.

Humpback whales are baleen whales, which means they are filter feeders. The primary food source for them are the sand lances that live on the bank. Apparently, a mature whale needs to eat about 120,000 sand lances a day. You can see the baleen in these humpback whale mouths.

We saw quite a few behaviors and several individual whales on the trip I participated in. Both trips were very similar. A summary for my trip is shown in the next picture.

The arrow shows where we were on the Stellwagen Bank. The behaviors we saw were bubble-net feeding, kick feeding, fluking and breaching. There were two babies. I guess the babies don’t get a name until they are one year old. There will be a section of this blog for each behavior.

Prior to bubble-net and kick feeding, the whales were bottom feeding by trying to scrape the sand lances up off the bottom. This often results in scraping their skin as shown on this whale.

Luckily for us, the sand lances moved up into the water column resulting in interesting feeding behaviors. If they were still bottom feeding, all we would have observed is the whales breathing and diving.

We were on a large boat. There were also small boats out there observing the whales and Meg said she would like to try that some day.

Bubble-Net Feeding

This is a cooperative feeding behavior, we last saw about twenty years ago. A group of whales find some sand lances and dive beneath them. Then they each release a cloud of air herding the sand lances into a bait ball. Then the whales swim through the bait ball trying to catch the sand lances in their mouths. They then surface, close their mouths and strain the sand lances out of the water using their baleen plates. It is pretty amazing to watch.

The whales dive and create the bubble net.

At one point they created a bubble net next to the boat and we could look directly down into it. You can see it is a pretty effective strategy.

Kick Feeding

This is an individual feeding behavior. The strategy is to herd the sand lances into a group and then stun them before eating them.

Breaching

Only the babies breached on this trip.

We as a group somehow managed to get five different shots of the same breach, two photos and three videos.

Fluking

BOIDS

There were cormorants and eider ducks in the harbor as we left.

The feeding whales drove the bait fish to the surface and the birds were more than willing to capitalize on it.

This is proof that the bird strategy occasionally works.

The whale watching this year was as good as we have ever seen it. We all had a blast.

Mark, Wink, Meg and Crew