Humpbacks, orcas play off of Redondo Beach
As orcas, humpbacks, and gray whales congregate in the South Bay, a local biologist witnesses the rarest of sights — a newly born baby whale and mother just off the PV coast
A humpback whale yearling takes flight in Redondo. The calf and his mother, a uncommon pairing, have been feeding in the South Bay in recent weeks. Photo by Gregg Gentry.
If he had kept to his plans, Eric Martin would have been sitting in a doctor’s office with his mother, thumbing through magazines and ruefully checking his phone.
Instead, the director of the Manhattan Beach Roundhouse Aquarium was in his 10-foot inflatable craft, watching as a volunteer stared, eye to eye, with a killer whale.
“It was one of the most insane killer whale experiences of my life,” he says — with a hint of understatement, considering the rest of his whale tale.
Amid the humpback whale fever that swept the South Bay two weeks ago, Martin decided to take his inflatable “bathtub” out for a spin along with his son, Cody, and Roundhouse volunteer David Lantos “to go have fun with those guys” — the guys, of course, being the whales. After spotting a few blows, the group came across a gray whale and what appeared, strangely to be a sea lion behind her. “Then we realized, this is a newborn gray whale calf!” he said, figuring that the small, black mass behind her was little more than an hour old. “I have never, ever in my whole life, ever come across an utterly newborn gray whale — that could barely swim, was still learning how to swim.”
It was then that he called Alisa Schulman-Janiger, director of the Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project, to share the news with her.
After turning to head back (and taking a detour to view a humpback mother and yearling “mama’s boy,” as he called him,) Martin’s son got a phone call from Schulman-Janiger: A group of orcas, a family known as the CA-51s, had appeared off of the coast — and baby gray whales are a favorite meal of killer whales.
But after a few passes from the excited whales, as well as a feeding display upon nearby sea lions, Martin — documenting the experience with his crew the whole time — encountered something he’d never before seen in his entire whale-loving career: the orcas were talking to each other.
“They didn’t just communicate with each other, but at the surface, you could hear which animal was talking to which animal,” Martin said. “The younger brother was talking to the older brother, and you could hear the vocalizations from what we picked up from the video camera.” Underwater video take by the group caught the orcas communicating under the surface as well, their vocalizations tipped off by streams of bubbles. “That encounter was just so unreal, because being in that little inflatable was just like being in the water.”
“So it all started with a young gray whale calf that was born about an hour old that could barely swim, to the two humpback whales, to an orca run. Not bad for a few hours out on the water.”
Eric Martin, his son Cody, and David Lantos spend an hour-plus under investigation by by orcas, in a 10-foot dinghy they refer to as “the bathtub.”
The Santa Monica Bay is a hotspot for whales in transit. Every year, hundreds of gray whales migrate along California, journeying from their homes to what Andy Bednarek, the the captain of local whale watching vessel Voyager, calls “Spring Break in Mexico,” a 14,000 mile journey from the Bering Sea to nursing grounds in Baja California. It’s a trip that the Gray Whale Census has been documenting for more than 30 years.
Schulman-Janiger, a photographer, biologist, orca expert, educator, and researcher, has directed the census project of the American Cetacean Society of Los Angeles throughout that time, as it charts sightings of gray whales throughout their migratory season. The Gray Whale Census Project, based at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, is staffed by volunteers from sunrise to sunset December 1 through May 31.
This season, through fewer than two months, ACS-LA has marked record numbers of sightings, with the highest number of southbound gray whales since the program began running — 782 as of Jan. 18. Last year at the same time, the count was at 602. “Already, we’re at the eighth highest southbound numbers if we don’t have any more migration,” Schulman-Janiger says.
According to Schulman-Janiger, the last few weeks have been the peak times for southbound gray migration, and in particular, for southbound gray calf migration.
“Right now, we’re seeing calves because they tend to give birth between the end of December or middle of February, and some whales are giving birth before they get to Baja,” she says. “If it’s the peak time of seeing southbound grays, it makes sense that it would be the time to see their calves.”
But if the grays are in transit, humpback whales appear to be simply hanging out; the aforementioned mother-yearling pairing in particular has caught significant interest within the last few weeks as they were spotted breaching the water’s surface in a spectacular display.
“The humpbacks are migrating to Baja, but quite a few are leaving late; the ones off of Redondo aren’t migrating, they’re feeding,” Schulman-Janiger says.
Gray whales feed up north, in their arctic Alaskan habitat before traveling to Mexico, while humpbacks stop to feed in California on their way.
“This is their feeding area — not usually HERE, here — usually Monterey Bay, Santa Barbara,” Schulman-Janiger says.
The mother of the humpback “mama’s boy” breaches. Photo by Gregg Gentry.
That the humpback pair is together is a bit of a rarity — not unheard of, according to those who study whales, but still remarkable. The calf, as naturalists explained, is a yearling; still a juvenile, but beyond the age that many would expect a calf to remain with its mother. Generally, young whales separate from their mothers at the feeding grounds, gaining confidence in their self-sufficiency as they wean themselves off of their mother’s milk.
This mother in particular has been given the nickname “Chompers,” thanks to her tendency to “chomp” at the air, opening and closing her mouth above water after she’s collected her meal. It’s a technique that was supposedly passed down from mother to calf, though unlike other techniques, this doesn’t appear to have a whole lot of value in actually securing food.
If it did, however, it would join a host of maneuvers that humpbacks have developed. Percussive slaps to the water’s surface and bubbling techniques are designed to herd prey into easily-devoured groups — as Voyager Captain Dave Doeh notes, many of the animals the humpbacks feed on (krill and smaller fish, such as sardines and anchovies) tighten up into a ball when they’re threatened.
The humpback’s “bubble-net” technique, in which a number of humpbacks act in concert to capture prey, takes full advantage of this defense mechanism. For this to work, a set of whales circles below prey, surrounding them in an ever-tightening cylinder of bubbles; this disorients and frightens the prey, forcing them into a densely-packed formation. From here, another set of whales attacks, sweeping upwards through the prey and scooping as many as possible into their jaws.
What drives whales to our end of Santa Monica Bay is upwelling from the Redondo Canyon, a natural trench that runs off of King Harbor for more than 30 miles. Currents from the formation push prey from areas more than a quarter-mile deep nearer to the water’s surface, where they become confused by the lack of water pressure. From there, they may as well be sushi.
What this means for whale lovers is that, in hanging around a veritable buffet of prey, they’re the closest a person could get to these giants of the ocean without jumping into the sea themselves.
A humpback breaches among a kayaker and a paddleboarder off Redondo. Photo by Sean Murphy/@murphyphoto on Instagram
Fortunately for those aboard the Voyager, and other whale-watching vessels like it, naturalists act as docents of the sea. Trained through a program of the Cabrillo Aquarium (and oftentimes by Schulman-Janiger), naturalists are there to offer their knowledge to passengers along the journey, offering information about the species they’re seeing and, occasionally, filling in the spaces with facts while the boat scours the seas for a whale.
The trips are often like a relaxed fishing expedition, as periods of laid-back anticipation are intermittently broken up with flashes of excitement. Though there’s not a bad seat aboard the Voyager, the bow is prime real estate, allowing one a view of nearly all sides — and, if lucky, the chance to see dolphins racing alongside the boat.
For the boat’s captains, safety is paramount — as much for whales as for passengers. “By law, everyone has to stay 100 yards away,” Bednarek says. “If whales come to you, that’s a different matter, but the bottom line is that I never want to affect their behavior. These guys are road tripping; the last thing I want to do is affect that.”
To that end, Bednarek gets as close to the whales as possible, keeping ahead of them if he can, in order to afford his passengers the best views they can get while remaining respectful of the whales. After all, as he says, the whales aren’t putting on a show for humans; we’re entering their playgrounds.
But as naturalist Vaish Shah reminds, the displays can still be life changing. “I think it was the day before Thanksgiving,” she says. “We had an older gentleman on board who said it was on his bucket list to go out whale watching,” and as a separate item, to see killer whales, though he had no expectation of the latter. But that day, he was in luck: There happened to be killer whales in the area, allowing the passenger to cross off two items in one trip. “He had tears in his eyes,” Shah said. “It was incredible to see someone have that dream come true for them.”
The appeal of whale-watching seems to hold different draws for everyone aboard, from the Redondo-based couple who were on their first trip after years of living in the area, to the packs of kids barely paying attention to the proceedings, to the landscape photographer who had already been on six whale-watching trips in 2015.
What drives Schulman-Janiger is sharing the wonders of whales. “Literally, last Friday, I thought I had nothing left. I’d been on boats five of the last seven days, I’d been at the census, I’ve been sick…I needed to recharge,” she said. “I told someone on Facebook that the only thing that would get me out of the house was a killer whale sighting.” Like clockwork, she was told of one three minutes later. She was out of her house fifteen minutes after that, on her way to a boat, her battery reloaded as if she’d been plugged into an outlet.
The only other thing she did that day, she says, was to put out an “orca alert” on Facebook: “A bunch of people I know suddenly had to leave work, or got on a boat or headed to shore with scopes,” she said. “Some people think you never get to see killer whales in California, and I really love the idea of enabling people to do that. It’s the educator in me.
“For each person, hopefully in this life, they find some sort of passion that gets them up in the morning, keeps them going, drives them and excites them,” Schulman-Janiger says. “For me, that’s it.” ER
An orca off Terranea in Palos Verdes. Photo by Mark Leach