On today’s whale watch aboard the Aurora, we headed back to the NW corner where our sei whale action was yesterday. The corner today was a bit more quiet, but I was elated today to spot a sei whale still out there. We also spotted scattered Northern Gannets throughout our trip.

Sei whale

We first spotted the blow in the distance, and each time the individual would also exhale 1-2 times at the surface before taking its dive. This whale continued to keep up with this behavior throughout the trip, often changing direction. We didn’t observe any skim feeding today, so I’m guessing perhaps the prey was deeper in the water column, or this animal was just looking for food.

Sei whale

Sei whales have been observed to take 40-60 second breath intervals, which is what myself and fellow naturalist Heidi also observed today. Later in the trip this whale began not to travel as much, and graced us with some nice looks alongside our boat.

Every day on the water while collecting whale sightings data, we have also been collecting data on the marine debris we see – which is quite a lot throughout an entire season! Today as we spotted some floating plastic in the water while watching our sei whale, it was a grim reminder of a recent article posted by National Geographic, How a DVD Case Killed a Whale, which is about a wei whale that had a piece of a DVD case lodged in its stomach, preventing it to eat. This unfortunate story can hopefully be shared with many as a reminder to be conscious about our plastic consumption, and where our trash ends up.

— Laura Howes

Sei whale skim feeding

So many sei skim snackers

Sei whale

Sideways skim feeding

Red-necked pharalopes

Our whale watch yesterday was a very special and unforgettable experience. We had a few usual suspects out there including Atlantic white-sided dolphins, harbor porpoises, minke whales and fin whales. But more importantly, we had a scattered group of about 10 skim feeding sei whales.

Sei whales skim with the Boston skyline in the distance

This was my very first time seeing sei whales, so it was an especially exciting trip for me! Sei whales are large, 40-60 foot baleen whales that rarely, but occasionally visit the inner waters of Massachusetts Bay.

Look at that baleen!

Synchronized skim feeding

Calanus copepod, sei whale food

While they are rorquals like fin, humpback and minke whales, their prey and feeding habits are more like right whales. Sei whales, like North Atlantic right whales, feed primarily on copepods, a type of zooplankton. When large patches of copepods are present, they sometimes swim through this area in groups taking advantage of this feeding opportunity. I had a lot of guests asking me about these copepods so I thought I'd add a photo to give our readers an idea of what type of animals these sei whales are filtering out of the water (see photo). Considering how small these animals are, you can imagine they have to filter a very large volume of water to get the biggest bang for their buck. They do this by opening their enormous mouths and swimming very slowly across the surface of the water for extended periods of time. This is what we call skim feeding. You can see from the photos that this type of feeding is very different from the powerful lunge feeding we are used to seeing humpback and fin whales displaying.

Open mouth, coming our way

Skim feeding is a very tranquil and beautiful behavior to watch and something, in four years of coming out to Stellwagen Bank, I have never been able to experience. This slow and graceful feeding gave guests the opportunity to observe, in slow motion, the function of ventral pleats and baleen. As these sei whales fed, they filtered seawater on their sides allowing guests to watch their ventral pleats stretch, their throats expanding as they slowly filled with seawater (see photos). We then observed this water flow through their baleen as they filtered their food out of the water.

Baleen and ventral pleats on full display

We watched these whales feeding in awe the entire trip and enjoyed listening to them breathe against the silence of a calm sea. I felt very lucky to have been on our whale watch yesterday and I know our guests did as well! It was an experience I know I will never forget!

Flat calm and peaceful skim feeding

I promised I would provide an update regarding an entangled whale we heard about over the VHF radio on Sunday. Fortunately, the humpback whale was successfully disentangled by the Center for Coastal Studies disentanglement team. However, with deep wounds and being underweight, it is likely still suffering from the effects of the entanglement.

— Tasia Blough

Lobo rolling while filtering

“Best day of my life!” was something that my fellow naturalist said on Saturday’s morning whale watch. We started the morning on the northwest corner where we saw a lot of gannets but no evidence of the whales that had graced this area just the day before. We spotted a blow and when to investigate and found a whale which was spending a lot of time just below the surface and constantly changing direction which we quickly deduced was an unusual and exciting sighting for the area: a sei whale! After a little while we decided to leave this whale and head farther south and came across a second sei whale also exhibiting this typical behavior. Sei whales feeding can be an awesome sight to behold (see the sighting log for Monday April 27) but unfortunately for us these seis just weren’t in the mood so we continued south in search of more whales.

Right whale skim feeding, it's baleen is very visible in this picture!

Our captain informed us that another whale watch boat had found whales far to the south and we decided to head that way to investigate.

Endangered right whales skim feeding

Early spring is not the time of year to get anywhere fast on Stellwagen Bank. Seasonal speed restrictions are in place until early to mid-May in many areas to protect the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale so traveling 9 miles at 10 knots is a very, very long trip. As we got closer to the area the other boat had reported whales in we started to see blows and our spirits were definitely uplifted. We headed for the first animal we saw and when it surfaced I zoomed in on my camera to get a good shot and noticed the characteristic callosities, patches of roughened skin colonized by whale lice, of the North Atlantic right whale.

Right whale tail (note white scarring on its peduncle)

It was incredibility exciting to see one of these amazing and endangered whales! Realizing it was a right whale and not a fin whale as originally suspected we moved away and suddenly there was a group of right whales skim feeding. We were overjoyed to have seen one right whale, imagine our reaction at seeing four! Right whales eat copepods, small zooplankton about the size of a grain of rice. Unlike humpback and fin whales, right whales don’t have grooves on their throats that allow the skin to expand when they engulf prey. Instead right whales keep their mouths open and plow through the patches of copepods. The water enters through a gap between their racks of baleen and flow out through the sides, a bit like how a fish’s gills work, and the very long wispy baleen captures the prey. Right whales sometimes “mow the lawn” and move back and forth through patches of prey which is exactly what we were seeing these four whales do.

Lots of skim feeding right whales

This gave me a great opportunity to get photographs of all sides of the head which researchers can use to identify the individual right whales. With such a small population size, only around 450-500 animals, it’s important to get as much information as possible about the whales that are here and what they’re doing.  It was an amazing once in a life time trip and I know that I will always remember it. Saturday’s afternoon trip was more typical for Stellwagen Bank but no less impressive. We headed out to the northwest corner where whale watch boats from Gloucester had found some humpback whales. The skies had clouded over since the morning and it was much more dramatic setting for a whale watch.

Whale tail

As we approached the center of the bank we could make out blows all along the eastern edge but with the speed restriction in place it was just going to be too hard to get to them with enough time.  We decided to stay with a trio of whales that ended up putting on quite a show. We identified old favorites Geometry and Aswan and thought we’d identified the third whale as Falcon but have since realized that unless Falcon grew a new dorsal fin, he wasn’t our third whale!

Going down for a dive

We did spot Falcon’s fluke but his ragged triangular dorsal fin was not the one in our group and our whales were not in the fluking mood. For most of the trip they did a lot of just below the surface traveling and low non fluking dives, where the fluke doesn’t flip up and show off the pigment pattern. It’s such a letdown when the whale arches its back and the tail stock lifts and you have everything in focus but the flukes don’t come out of the water

Pile of humpback whales

None the less, my favorite part of the trip may have been the underwater “pile up” we witnessed. We could see all three whales below the surface, pectoral fins glowing, but all the whales seemed a bit piled up and it was difficult to guess which pectoral fins went with which whales. It all was a perfect end to a perfect day on Stellwagen Bank.

— Tegan, Laura C., and Tasia

The feeding frenzy was short-lived as the group scattered. However, they collectively showed a deliberate movement northeast followed by the dolphins and hungry sea birds. After traveling for 15 minutes or so, a group of 4 humpbacks stopped to participate in a few rounds of bubble netting. We watched Aswan, Blackbird, Sprinkler and a sneaky 4th whale feed while a number of fin whales perused the area. All the while, dolphins interacted with the boat and took advantage of the efforts of the Humpback Whales.

Baleen and seabirds

As we turned for home, we saw a couple of feeding groups in the distance and recognized Zeppelin and Patchwork. Before leaving, we even had a quick minke whale encounter!

This afternoon, the feeding appeared to slow down, but it's possible that feeding was still occurring but lower in the water column. We first came across Sprinkler and 747 who were repeatedly diving beneath the boat. As captain Chip noted yesterday, we really don't know if their close approaches were due to a fascination with the boat or sand lance beneath us, but they consistently surfaced within about 20 yards of our boat for about 25 minutes.

Sprinkler open-mouth feeding

After some time a solo calf swam into the area, after which sprinkler must have slipped away and was not seen again. Although we did not observe 747 and this calf exhibiting behavior typical of a strong mother calf bond, there were no other obvious humpbacks nearby that could have been a potential mother to this calf. We will keep an eye out for this young whale in the coming days to make a positive determination as to whose calf this is.

Unknown fluke

We then moved on to a group of five humpbacks, Falcon, Persied, Snare, Mend and Canopy, which were making approximately 6 minute synchronized dives. We suspected that this group may have been in search of, or feeding on, bait lower in the water column.

Minke whales also made a strong showing in this afternoon, a number of which came unusually close to the boat giving the passengers beautiful looks of these often elusive whales. Our bird sightings yesterday included hundreds of diving gannets, herring gulls, laughing gulls, common cormorants, eiders, white-winged scoters and a pair of razorbills. We had a fantastic Sunday on the water!

— Tasia Blough

Rainbows and whales

Acrobatic and entertaining dolphins

Whale breath