Hi Everyone,
When I woke up today, I was very concerned I wouldn’t have anything fun to tell you about, it certainly could have been a very short blog post, especially as I knew I would be spending 5 hours doing salinometry and I can only tell you about my audiobooks so many times…..
But then, literally as we were eating lunch, we got a call from the bridge saying they had seen whales. Only myself and Geraint went to look, we get a lot of false alarms or very distant whales. We went and stood on the port side, and saw nothing for about 10 minutes, at which point we gave up and returned back to the galley. As we were walking back, we heard cries of excitement from around the corner and it turned out that the whales had come much closer and appeared on the other side of the ship. They were incredibly close, at some points only a metre or two from the ship, truly couldn’t have been much closer. They were huge humpback whales, evidently feeding on a huge swarm of something, and we got incredible views of their heads, backs and flukes. They were also rapidly joined by a number of chinstrap penguins, who were jumping and “porpoising” around a foot out of the water with great athleticism. The vista was completed by a variety of seabirds including petrels and prions as they dove and flew about in the sky above us, it was truly stunning and without a doubt one of the best wildlife encounters I have ever seen. I’ll try to send across some of my photos, and once I get better ones from other people I will forward those as well.
The ecologists on board suggested that there must have been a swarm of something to encourage so many animals to be in one place, but nothing on the echosounder or elsewhere suggested krill. This suggested that the animals were likely to be amphipods, which can gather and swarm very close to the surface before diving towards deeper water. This was supported by some samples showing spherical faeces.
Overall, I think our initial group spent about an hour and a half watching the wildlife, before some of the whales started to dive and a few of us were called away to deal with the CTD that was coming up (which was thankfully also the reason we were able to spend so long in one place as we waited for it to rise). We got very cold as we were outside watching as no one wanted to leave to get warm clothes or cameras and miss a second of the view, but gradually people managed to run inside to grab warmer clothes and cameras as time wore on and the winds began to bite. I think we all managed to escape with our extremities intact, even the one crewmember who insisted on watching in crocs and shorts…..
A stunning day, and some sights we won’t forget for a while.
14/01/23
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