Blue wonder – Local biologists, whale watchers, paddlers and boaters are experiencing a rare up-close look at the world’s largest animal

Craig Stanton was sitting on the deck of his condo overlooking King Harbor in Redondo Beach a little more than two weeks ago when something in the ocean caught his eye.

A white plume rose from the blue water not far from the harbor’s entrance. Stanton, a 100-ton captain and longtime harbor hand, was puzzled. He thought it must be the exhaust from a vessel. But no ship was in sight. He grabbed his binoculars and looked again. What he saw made his jaw drop: in just seconds, he saw eight spouts blowing sky high less than a mile away.

“Oh my god,” he said, putting the binoculars down and grabbing his phone. “Time to call the boys.”

The largest animals in the history of the Earth had arrived. Blue whales, as long as 110 ft. and weighing up to 200 tons, are not unknown in local waters. They frequently summer in the Santa Barbara Channel and sometimes a scattered few can be found off the coast of Palos Verdes. But never in living memory had a group of blues arrived here in these numbers or in this manner.

Stanton earlier this year was one of four local skippers who purchased the Voyager, a 65 ft. passenger boat purpose-built for this harbor. It has become known as the South Bay’s preeminent whale watching vessel. Whale watching in these waters, however, usually begins in late December and follows gray whale migrations. Stanton called his fellow skippers. Something strange and unusual was happening, he told them. It was time to launch the Voyager.

On that Saturday the Voyager set out from King Harbor on a voyage unlike any before in its 50 years exploring local waters. More than 20 naturalists from the Cabrillo Whale Watch program were on board. The excitement was palpable as the 65 ft. vessel cut through the fog and left the Redondo breakwater.

Diane Alps, a program coordinator at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium who also serves as a volunteer naturalist for the whale watch program on board the Voyager, spoke on the ship’s intercom. She said blue whales are often heard before they are seen – the steep exhale of a blue can be heard from hundreds of yards away – but visible signs might also appear on the water.

“We are looking for fins and tails,” she said. “We are looking for any disturbance.”

A whale watching trip is an exercise in hope, wonder, and luck. Stanton formerly served as a charter boat captain in Mexico. He would take groups hundreds of miles up the Sea of Cortez in hopes of just a few glimpses of the mighty blue whales. After buying the Voyager, the new ownership hired another local captain to operate the boat day-to-day  – Brad Sawyer, who during last year’s whale season logged a 98 percent success rate in finding whales on each trip (75 percent is considered a good rate).

“He’s got that fish sense,” Stanton said, noting that Sawyer’s experience as a former fisherman was invaluable. “It’s not something you learn out of a book.”

Sawyer was looking for current breaks and the telltale slicks on the water’s surface known as “flukeprints” – a flattening of the water that the movement of the blue whale’s massive tail creates when it kicks just below the surface.

He was also looking for so-called “whale birds,” a species called phalaropes that feed on the same crustacean – tiny shrimplike creatures known as krill – that form the bulk of a blue whale’s 8,000 pound, 1.5 million daily calorie intake.

“Bird life is really key,” Sawyer said.

And make no mistake: the whales are here for the krill. Some of the same conditions that had made for the uncharacteristically cool “bummer summer” also helped foster a rich krill bloom locally. Strong offshore winds created an upwelling, bringing cold water to the surface, particularly along the edges of the underwater Redondo Canyon that extends straight off Redondo.

Sawyer patrolled the canyon. A few miles outside the harbor a very large breath was heard. “3 o’clock!” one of the naturalists exclaimed. Everybody moved to the starboard side of the boat and saw an 80 ft. blue whale surfacing. Another surfaced right beside it.

Blue whales often travel in pairs. Another on-board naturalist – Bernardo Alps, the president of the American Cetacean Society’s LA chapter (who met his future wife Diane while whale watching in 1999) – noted that the male is nearly always to the rear of the female and is known to keep close proximity to her prior to breeding season.

“It is related to mating,” Alps said. “The male will stay with her weeks or months in anticipation of being able to mate.”

Soon somebody shouted “12 o’clock” and shortly thereafter “6 o’clock.” Two pairs of whales were right in front and behind the boat. They were feeding below the surface, rather than “lunge feeding” with open mouths along the surface. This meant that they frequently dove. In the course of the next 90 minutes, everybody on board the Voyager was treated to among the most impressive of whale watching sights – particularly for photographers – when the blue whale raises its flukes out of the water before kicking downward in a dive.

During the course of a three hour trip, the Voyager encountered seven flukes.

Stanton was amazed. In a decade of working whale watch boats, he’d never seen anything like it.

“This is phenomenal,” he said. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This is just whale watching at its finest.”

What he could not have fathomed is that over the course of the next two weeks, as the Voyager began daily and sometimes twice a day trips, this would be the fewest whales it would encounter. One day last week the vessel found itself surrounded by more than 30 blue whales off the coast of Palos Verdes. All totaled, somewhere between 50 and 80 blue whales have arrived off the coast of the South Bay. It has created such a stir that a crew from the CBS Nightly News arrived to film the phenomenon.

Diane Alps said the network of whale watchers up and down the coast is abuzz with news of the congregation of blue whales that is occurring here.

“We’ve got a lot of blue whale out there right now,” Diane Alps said. “This is definitely where it is happening.”

Songs of the deep

The question is why. The short answer is krill. But in a larger sense, nobody entirely knows.

Despite the fascination human beings have with blue whales, they are among the least understood animals on our planet. Biologists believe, for example, that they live between 30 to 50 years, but even this is uncertain. Some believe a blue whale can live to be 100. A persistence of mystery surrounds the lives of these whales

The whales that are currently visiting this coast are known as the Eastern North Pacific population and are believed to number somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 animals out of a worldwide population of 10,000 to 15,000. These whales mainly migrate between winter breeding areas off Mexico and Costa Rica and summer feeding off California, Oregon, sometimes even British Columbia and, more rarely, the Gulf of Alaska. Up until just a few decades ago, it wasn’t even understood how separate this population was from another population further north and west in the Pacific. The two populations, marine biologists have discovered, differ in size, range, and in the songs they sing.

And it is in the area of song that the mysteries of the blue whale deepen.

Male blue whales are magnificent singers, and such a description is not simply anthropomorphic. (Female blues do not sing.) They produce a profoundly deep-throated, structured sound that has both similar intent to our own songs – seeking a mate – and appears to be somewhat cooperatively constructed. Blue whale songs are projected so powerfully that they can be heard by other whales 1,000 to 1,600 miles away. This much has been understood for decades, but over the past few years scientists have made a series of startling discoveries. Each population of whales not only has a distinct song – at least ten different song types globally – but they change their song, together, each year.

(the “A” call, the first of the blue whale’s two-part song. Courtesy of John Hildebrand/Scripps Institute for Oceanography)

“They do put a lot of effort into synchronizing and it’s amazing,” said Dr. John Hildebrand of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography, one of the pioneers in the study of blue whale song. “It means the frequency they put out isn’t just relative to body size, because all the different body sizes, young animals as well as older animals – if you look at how they are synchronizing, they must be listening to each other, and mimicking.”

A paper published last month in the Acoustical Society of America by a team of researchers from San Francisco State University analyzed recordings of 4,378 blue whale songs recorded off the California coast. The whale songs are sung in two parts – an initial pulse, called the A call, and a long, sonorous moan called the B call. The scientists found that the whales were producing the B call at almost the identical pitch – 16.02 Hz, exactly four octaves below a middle C – with a variation of only a half percent in pitch (the difference between C and C sharp, by comparison, is 6 percent) among whales.

Hildebrand said the collective changes in songs are particularly significant.

“So there must be some process, ‘Oh, gee, that guy is singing at that pitch, I better follow him and sing at that pitch,’” he said. “And it happens every year – every year there is sort of a consistent song. That is blue whale culture. They have an agreed upon song from year to year.”

Hildebrand’s team last year made an equally shocking discovery. They listened to thousands of blue whale recordings, beginning with the first made, by the U.S. Navy in the 1960s and including the extensive recordings they have made with their own marine acoustic listening stations since the 1990s and other recordings that have been made around the world over the last 30 years. The scientists found that whales throughout the planet have been lowering the pitch of their songs year by year. The whales are singing deeper in what appears to be a systematic fashion. The Eastern North Pacific blue whales have deepened the sound of their songs by 31 percent over the past four decades; other blue whale populations, though less studied, have likewise lowered the pitch and sound frequency of their songs.

“It took a while for us to come to grips that it was real,” Hildebrand said. “We discovered each year they lowered the pitch…After a couple years we were like, ‘What is going on out there?’ Every year it was a little bit lower. Then we went back and looked at the Navy data and indeed found it had been a slow steady push downward for over 40 years.”

Nobody could say definitively why this was happening. One hypothesis was that it had to do with the increasing ambient noise in the oceans, but this was illogical – if the whales were struggling to hear each other, it would seem to be more effective to raise their voices, not lower them. They are actually singing somewhat more quietly.

Hildebrand thinks the reason the whales have dropped their voices may be the oldest in creation: it’s sexier. Male blue whales are singing lower, he believes, because it is more impressive to females and increases their chances to mate. It is sexual selection at work – a lower-pitched song indicates a bigger, more impressive male – think Barry White style seduction – and is thereby more attractive to females.

This line of reasoning, if correct, may also be partly related to why the blue whales are here now. Hildebrand thinks that perhaps whales are naturally inclined to sing lower but have only been able to do so as their numbers have increased. They can sing more quietly and impressively now, in other words, because there are more animals and their songs don’t have to travel as far.

Hildebrand argues that this fits the timeline – whaling was only outlawed in 1966, and up until that time there was still an active whaling station as close as Long Beach. Globally, more than 360,000 blue whales were slaughtered in the first six decades of the 1900s, decimating the worldwide population by an estimated 90 percent. The historic population of Eastern North Pacific blue whales was believed to be more than 10,000. By the time of the whaling ban, some believe their numbers were less than 1,000.

Whatever the cause for their presence here, Hildebrand said that the blue whales in California are singing right now. As they prepare to head south for warmer climes this winter, the males are extremely intent on finding a mate.

“They can sing for hours, maybe even days on end,” Hildebrand said.

The animals even have a trick of being able to come to the surface and breathe without disrupting their song, Hildebrand said, almost like an opera singer. Though the songs are not easily discernable to human ears – blue whales sing at a frequency near the bottom of the range of our hearing – scientists with acoustic equipment are hearing a proliferation of blue whale song.

“This is a good time,” Hildebrand said. “This is the beginning of the season, sort of, when they may be pairing up. They use the opportunity here, singing to find a mate, then they will stick with her however long they need to into the breeding season. It’s almost a peak time in singing – maybe it helps to ask her out early if you are going to go to the prom.”

Among whales

Probably nobody alive has spent more time among the blue whales of California than John Calambokidis.

As the founder of the Cascadia Research Collective, in Olympia, Washington, Calambokidis came to California in 1986 to study humpback whales. He encountered a surprising number of blues and took the opportunity to investigate. At the time, almost nothing was known of the blue whale population here – nobody, Calambokidis recalled, had any idea that this was the largest remaining group of blue whales left in the world.

“When we started in the mid 1980s, there was very little known about them,” Calambokidis said.

He proceeded to document the population. One of the initial mysteries he investigated was how the whales shifted the areas in which they fed. At times, they would range up to British Columbia and Alaska; other times they would stay in California. Some whales go both places in a single feeding season. Though blue whales travel only three or four miles per hour while feeding, they can do so 24 hours a day and therefore cover nearly 1,000 miles in ten days.

With the help of local biologists – including Eric Martin, the co-director of the Roundhouse Aquarium in Manhattan Beach – Calambokidis tracks individual blue whale movements through photo identification. One whale last year ranged from British Columbia to Santa Barbara in less than a month.

“I think these animals generally are shifting around a fair amount to take advantage of krill abundance,” Calambokidis said. “So the fact that they are showing up [near Redondo] now is not in itself unusual. When it occurs in heavily populated areas like off Redondo, LA, and Santa Monica Bay, it maybe gets a little more attention.”

The whales who have fed near the Redondo harbor have received a deluge of attention. They are an irresistible source of curiosity for local watermen, who can now paddle out of the harbor and encounter the largest animal in the history of the world. The largest blue whales are twice the tonnage of the closest dinosaur, and by National Geographic’s calculations weigh as much as the entire National Football League combined. Their hearts weigh 1,200 pounds alone; even a baby blue whale is 24 ft. long and comes into the world weighing 3 tons, then quickly adds 200 pounds a day from their mother’s milk.

Gene “Tarzan” Smith took up standup paddling only three years ago after suffering a ski injury. His friend Laird Hamilton, the professional surfer, introduced him to paddling and he now paddles every day. He paddled out to the whales 12 days in a row. The more he has been around the animals, he said, the more they seem to have grown comfortable. A whale has approached his board so close that he touched it (rather than use his paddle) and last week a whale flipped on its side and looked at him, eyeball to eyeball.

“They have gotten more friendly, more tame, I think – more use to people being up there,” Smith said. “One day one came up to me and swam on its side and it looked at me and its fin came up and it kind of brushed my board…The only thing is if that tail came up and hit you, these things weigh 100 tons or whatever. It’s like an 18-wheel truck barreling along with two fuel tanks. It’s just gigantic. It’s pretty thrilling, but you want to be careful.”

Some of his friends in the paddleboarding community – a local group that trains together and is dubbed “The Donkeys” – have taken to calling Smith “the whale whisperer.” Last Friday, the Donkeys went with him and visited the whales. Paddleboarder Jeff Cohn said the whales seemed as curious about humans as the humans were about them.

“It felt like they were really smart, the way they travelled around you,” Cohn said. “We were out there about an hour and when we came back to the beach they followed us in, almost circling us, like they didn’t want us to leave…Right as we were leaving one came up on its side and a fin came up and it kind of waved. They just seemed so gentle and so curious.”

“They are so big, so massive, it’s a little scary because you are just kind of at their mercy,” Cohn added. “Lucky none were breaching. The other thing was just seeing all the water they displaced when they move, and the sound of their breathing….When you get a whiff downwind of their breath when they blow, you get kind of a rotten fish smell. It’s amazing. It stinks, but it’s pretty surreal.”

Eric Martin, from the Roundhouse Aquarium, had an interesting encounter with a blue off Marina del Rey. He and his son were in their 18-ft. boat when a lunge-feeding whale surfaced nearby, holding open its mouth and exposing its baleen (a filter-like structure made of the same material as fingernails) and sucking in krill. The whale subsequently approached the boat, pressing krill against it in order to better contain its catch.

“We had the boat turned off and we see this krill just dancing at the surface, like water boiling,” Martin said. “We were like, ‘Oh my god, what is happening’ and a whale came up to us. It could get more krill by using us to compress it. They used our boat as a tool. It was amazing.”

Not all the encounters have been so pacific. Craig Stanton, from the Voyager, said the frenzy around the group outside the Redondo harbor has gotten to the point that the whales are sometimes being molested. Witnesses reported seeing a man on a jet ski race up to a blue whale earlier this week and use its back to “get air” and whoop in celebration afterwards.

“That is just ridiculously stupid,” Stanton said. “There is a safe distance to keep from these things, and they are affected by boat traffic. They are big and lumbering, and they are trying to feed, so we need to let them be, a little bit.”

They are also still endangered species. Legally, people are required to stay at a 100-yard remove from the animals, although the whales will sometimes themselves approach closer. Because of their size, blue whales have likely not developed a fear of boats. In 2007, four were killed in the shipping lanes in the Santa Barbara Channel. Their only known predators are killer whales.

Calambokidis said that he did a study using suction cup tags in order to observe how the whales behave as ships approach.

“They didn’t seem to react in any way to avoid it,” he said. “In fact, some of the whales seemed to spend more time at the surface when a ship was nearby, making them more vulnerable. This is not a threat they are really evolutionarily equipped to deal with.”

It’s impossible to predict how long the blue whales will be in the South Bay. According to local whale watchers, a smaller number were here last year until early December. So far, the krill abundance still seems strong, and so most observers think that the whales will stay at least through this month.

“There are a lot of krill out here,” said Smith. “Who knows how long they’ll be around. It’s definitely a thrilling South Bay story, no doubt about it. We are blessed that is going on here. It’s pretty cool.” ER

The Voyager is running daily weekday whale watching trips noon to 3 p.m. and twice daily weekend trips beginning at 9 a.m. See www.voyagerexcursions.com or Facebook for more information or call 310-944-1219.

See additional blue whale photos and video.

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Video by Gordon Gates:

Video by Kelly McCarthy Fitzgerald:

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