Past Featured Whales

On Sun, August 22, 2004 we were surprised to see a group of Risso's Dolphins, or Grampus, between Stellwagen Bank and Jeffreys Ledge. Risso's are large for dolphins, reaching 13-15 feet in males. The group was of 15-20 animals, and included at least one young calf. Many animals in the group were apparently body surfing on the swells present that day. Their unusual coloration (gray, covered with lines and scratches) made this offshore species unmistakable. Risso's dolphins usually feed on squid, and we have heard from several fishermen that squid are more abundant than usual, so these animals may have been chasing prey. They were certainly an unexpected treat!

One of our most distinctive sightings this year (2002 field season) was of a nearly all white pilot whale calf! This unmistakable animal was seen on several days near Cape Cod during late July and early August. Based on its size and behavior, we think the animal was at least six months old, and it appeared to still be nursing from the mother. While there is hardly any coloration at all on this whale, there is a light grey swath on the animal's back. (Pilot whale vocalizations)

This is one of three pilot whales that we know of which are completely white, or nearly so. In 1998, a pilot whale calf was photographed on Jeffreys Ledge that appeared to be all white. This whale has been seen again on the Ledge in almost every subsequent year. Previously, in the early 1980's, a scientific note was published which described a white pilot whale adult that was seen on offshore government surveys.

White whales have been famous ever since Herman Melville published Moby Dick in the 1850's. Moby Dick was supposed to be an albino sperm whale. In reality, Moby Dick was based on a real whale named Mocha Dick who was famous in the 1820's and 1830's in the South Pacific. This whale was not white but supposedly "coffee" colored, but was otherwise similar to the animal that Melville described. True albino sperm whales have now been seen and even filmed several times; the PBS-TV series "Nature" aired dramatic underwater footage of a young albino sperm whale calf several years ago. In addition, one in every 100 southern right whales is born light colored, although they darken with age. We also know a totally white humpback whale that has been seen since the late 1980's off the coast of Australia.

Not all white animals are true albinos. Albinism indicates a true lack of pigment, so eyes also lack any color as well. However, there can also be animals that have pigment, but it does not show up well or is weaker than usual. This is likely the case with our young pilot whale, as reflected by the gray color on the back. We have also tracked a number of Atlantic white-sided dolphins that have unusually large white patches on their body, although there are parts of them that are normally pigmented.

The usual light/dark coloring pattern of whales and dolphins (and many fish species) is referred to as counter-shading, because the animals are lightly colored on their undersides and darkly colored on their topsides. As a result, when viewed from below in the upper water column, the light belly would tend to blend in with the daytime sky above, making them difficult to see. Conversely, when viewed from above, the dark back would tend to blend in with the dark waters below. Because this helps them blend into their background visually, it is thought that it helps them escape predators (killer whales and, possibly, sharks). We don't know if the white coloration on the whale leaves it more vulnerable to attack because it can be seen more easily, but our sighting record of other white animals indicates they can survive for long periods.

Actually, we don't think we ever saw this whale alive. It was a young, male, humpback whale which came into Cape Cod Bay in late May of this year. Fishermen reported seeing this whale very close to shore for about a week prior to its stranding, but these reports were not confirmed. On Sunday, June 3, however, this whale was found beached at low tide on a sand bar. It died a few hours later. The carcass was recovered and moved to the Brewster town landfill, where a number of scientists, including Whale Center staff, did a complete necropsy (an animal autopsy) to find out more about why the animal died. The necropsy was led by Katie Touhey of the Cape Cod Stranding Network.

Initially it was not easy to get a look at the fluke pattern of this whale, as it died and was placed belly-down. In order to identify it, we had to have a front-end loader lift the massive flukes (below right) while we lay underneath and looked up. During the necropsy we removed both sides (flukes) of the tail, as you can see in the photo below. We have completed a careful match of this whale against those we have previously photographed, and we have not been able to find a previous history of it.

Full article and additional images.

While most whales we feature have been sighted regularly, Quixote has only been seen in three years in our study area of the southern Gulf of Maine. Nonetheless, she has been a fascinating animal to us.

Quixote was first sighted as a young whale in 1989; we suspect that she was born in 1987 based on her size when first sighted. We don't know what habitat she spent her time in during those two years, but we suspect it might have been somewhere off of Maine or southern Canada, based on subsequent sightings. She was named for a mark low on her right fluke, which looks remarkably like the famous sketch of Don Quixote riding a horse.

Quixote was seen here extensively in 1989, and again in 1990 and 1991. It was in 1990, however, that she became a dramatic, memorable animal. While on an early morning research cruise aboard Silver I, our first research vessel, we found Quixote badly entangled in a gill net (a kind of fixed fishing gear). Quixote had probably been feeding near the bottom, and had blundered into the net while chasing fish. She probably rolled to try to escape, but that only made it worse. When we saw her she had netting coming through the mouth on both sides, crossing on her back, wrapping around her dorsal fin, and trailing behind her. We don't know how much gear she was towing, but we could see it trailing off into the depths over 100 yards behind the whale. Despite that, she was able to tow all that gear with her. The regional disentanglement team was unable to reach us that day, and when we left Quixote she was slowly traveling to the southeast. When we did not resight her in the next several days, we feared the worst.

Although she was not seen again for several months, Quixote managed to shed all that gear unassisted. She was seen briefly in October, free of all gear. In 1991, she was once again sighted on a near daily basis.

Then, as suddenly as she appeared, Quixote failed to return. Year after year went by and we didn't see her. Then, in 1997, after a 6-year absence, Quixote was resighted - all the way up at the mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada! New England humpbacks rarely move that far north, stopping for the most part on the Nova Scotian Shelf. Then, in 1999, she was sighted off the Maine coast with her first recorded calf!

Even though we have not seen Quixote in our study area off the Massachusetts coast in a decade, we hope she returns here sometime in the near future. She has shown us how much we still have to learn about the movements of these animals, and she is also an whale who is lucky to be alive.

Mallard is an adult male who was first photographed in 1987 in the Great South Channel, on the southwestern edge of Georges Bank. Mallard came onto Stellwagen Bank first in 1988, when he was seen numerous times during the year. 1988 was unusual because many whales that do not usually spend a lot of time spent prolonged periods on the Bank; Mallard was one of those animals. He was seen again in 1989, although not as often as in 1988. Mallard's name comes from a squiggle mark on the upper right fluke that looks like a duck sitting on the water.

Mallard became an important study animal in 1990. In July of that year, everyone was on the lookout for a humpback whale named Quixote, who was entangled in a kind of fishing gear called a gill net. Gill nets are fixed nets that fishermen leave for 1-2 days to catch fish. If a whale swims into the net, it will tow the net along with it. This is very dangerous for the whale, as the netting adds a lot of drag while it is swimming. The net could also snag along the bottom and prevent the whale from surfacing. Whale Center of New England scientists had found Quixote with a lot of gill net gear on it, but the whale slipped away before anyone could help it. Everyone was on alert to look for an entangled whale so it could be freed.

We got a call the morning of July 13 that an entangled whale had been sighted, and immediately rushed to the scene in our research boat, Silver I. Much to our surprise, it was not Quixote but Mallard who was carrying fishing gear that day! Since we had seen Mallard with no gear on it only two days before, the entanglement had to be recent.

Shortly after we got there, staff from the Center for Coastal Studies also arrived on scene. The Center is the only group in this area authorized by the government to do the actual disentanglement work, and we worked that day to support their efforts. Using small inflatable boats they approached Mallard, and attached floatation buoys to the fishing gear on the whale. This is used to tire the whale out and keep it near the surface while Center staff work to cut the whale free. Mallard was not always placid, though, and at one point nearly tipped over the inflatable with a powerful swipe of his huge tail flukes. Slowly and carefully, though, Center staff was able to cut the whale free. For a few seconds mallard did not react at all; then he started heading away at great speed.

We have only seen Mallard sporadically over the past few years; he has returned in 1991, 1994-5, 1997, and 1999. Along the way his dorsal fin has become clipped, probably a result of breeding battles with other males. Every time we see him, though, we know that if it were not for human intervention, he might have lost his life to that entanglement.

While entanglements continue to take place, Whale Center staff is now officially appointed members of a government team working with fishermen, government agents, and other scientists and conservationists to finally solve the problem in a way that works for both whales and for fishermen.

Perhaps no whale can show the highs and lows of whale research like Silver. This adult female taught us so much, but suffered horribly at the hands of humans despite being a member of a protected species.

Silver's first sad encounter with humans happened sometime before we met her in 1979. By the time we first saw her, Silver was missing half of her tail. While we can never be sure a boat propeller cut it off, the clean slice of a wound indicates to us it was likely a sharp blade which took away part of her tail. Amazingly, Silver was able to do everything every other whale could and was even pregnant during the first year we saw her.

In the winter of 1980, Silver gave birth to the first of 5 calves we saw her produce. We saw her and her 1980 calf, later named Beltane, on many days during the summer of 1980. After that summer Beltane, like most calves, weaned and separated from the mother. She started returning to the area on her own in the following summer. In 1985, when she was five years old, she became the first whale of any kind anywhere in the world followed from birth to reproductive maturity. In 1985, Beltane was sighted with her first calf, Cat Eyes, who we still see today.

Silver also taught us a lot about humpback social organization. Humpback whales on their feeding grounds are thought to form random groups which stay together a day or less. While this is often true, we also know that whales can build up friendships. In 1979, 1982, and 1984, Silver was repeatedly sighted with another big female named T-Square. Interestingly, both whales were pregnant in all of those years; in years when they were not, they were never seen together!

Silver also had calves in 1983 (Aster), 1985 (Peninsula), 1988 (Coral), and 1990 (Chablis). But in spring 1991, Silver's life came to a tragic end. In early May her carcass was found on a beach off of Long Island with steel cable wrapped around it. The cabling could have come from a fishing boat; it could have been dropped from a tanker or other large ship. But while this big female was able to tow the cabling for a while, it eventually ended up taking her life.

We don't know how old Silver was when she died; since she was an adult in 1979, she had to be at least 15-20 years old and perhaps more. We had no good way to age her, either alive or dead. But we still regret losing this whale before she could have lived out her natural life span. In memory of her inspirational life, both of our research boats have been named for her, Silver and Silver II.

Molson is a large adult female humpback whale, named for the white foam-like spots near her dorsal (back) fin. She was first seen briefly in the fall of 1980, though we only saw her on a single day that year, our first complete season of data collection. In June 1981, however, she became a very special whale when we saw her surface feeding. On that day we saw Molson do something we had not seen any other whale do.

All humpback whales use bubbles to help trap near-surface prey; fish will not cross a bubble blast. But as Molson added a unique twist to this. She would come up, slam her chin down, then slam her tail down, and then dive underneath the water's surface and then release air bubbles on the spot where she had created the surface turmoil. This would be followed a few seconds later by a feeding lunge. We were perplexed by her behavior, but guessed that she was stunning her fish, stopping them on a spot, before she dove to feed on them.

The following year we saw one other whale, Walrus, use a similar technique. But nothing prepared us for what was coming in the following years. By the end of the 1980's, more than half of all whales used this tail-slam feeding technique. We have since looked carefully at which whales were doing this behavior, and determined it was mainly young whales which were developing the technique, and they appeared to be learning it from other young animals in their society. While we might have expected that a calf would learn the behavior from its mother, that is not the case; instead, they learn it from other animals. Molson's first calf, named Alphorn, has never developed the behavior. We have, however, seen many calves of mothers who do not use this style later develop it.

Molson today continues to use her original feeding style. Whether she was the first whale to develop it, or whether she was just the first one we saw, we will never know. But she will always be important as an originator for what has now become a very common behavior. She is now the mother of 6 calves, her most recent one (Menace) in 1997.

Icarus is foremost a survivor. Named for the greek god who flew too close to the sun and had his wings melted, Icarus first appeared as a tiny whale in 1982 with drooped tail edges. It looked like someone had tied the two outer ends of his flukes into a tight circle! His diminutive size when he appeared indicated that he was no more than a year old. How his tail came to be curved we don't know, but cuts at the base of his fluke indicate likely fishing gear or line entanglement, which apparently cut related tendons.

We worried about whether a young animal could survive such a severe injury, but Icarus has done so. By the end of the first year, we could already see his flukes straightening out. His fluke has never been totally normal, but he seems to get by very well. We have seen him every year since that first sighting, and he is now almost twenty years old. He appears to be a little smaller than most adult males, but appears to behave as normal adult males do. He continues to be one of the whales we can count on seeing numerous times during each season.

Icarus is also notable because of his all black pectoral fins (see photo). Most humpback whales in the North Atlantic have white flippers, which have evolved, it seems, to startle and scare their prey. Less than 1% of our whales have black flippers. On the other hand, black flippers are very common in the Pacific Ocean humpback whales off of Australia.

Entanglements in a variety of fishing gear types remains one of the major threats to marine mammals today, as the same waters whales find so great for feeding are also productive for fishermen. Icarus is both a reminder of this peril, and the ability of some whales to survive even serious injury.