Baby Whales!
Today was quite an exciting whale watch! The first pod of humpback whales we encountered off Cape Moreton included a mother with a tiny newborn baby! The calf was very small, still light grey in colour and still had a bent-over dorsal fin and a very soft, floppy tail fluke. When they are first born they are usually lighter grey, sometimes a creamy white colour, and their fins and flukes are soft and rolled up kind of like a newspaper to make birth easier. The fins then harden and stand up straight after a couple of weeks; so this little calf would have been only a week or so old! We had a fantastic time watching this little tucker swimming strongly alongside mum and even showing off a few somewhat uncoordinated-looking attempts at head lunges and tail slaps! Very cute!
We enjoyed the company of this mother-calf pair peacefully travelling north for a while, before wishing them luck and heading back towards the Cape. Before long we found another pod of whales, fast approaching from the south. As it turned out, there was another tiny baby in this pod! So lucky; we don’t often see newborn calves in this area, let alone two in one day!! This baby whale was even smaller than the first and still a milky creamy colour over large parts of its body! Unfortunately, this encounter was not as peaceful as the first. The mother and calf were being chased by two big adult whales, presumably males. They were moving very fast, lunging through the water and it looked just like the usual competitive courtship pods we often see when males are pursuing females to mate with. This female had a new baby though so she was obviously not ready to mate! They have a single baby every 2-3 years at a time, so it will normally be at least a year until this mother is ready to conceive again. It was obvious that she was not happy about the advances of the males, she was swimming fast, trying to get away, and it was amazing that her tiny baby managed to keep up! Infanticide is common in other mammals. A well-known example is lions, where if a male takes over a pride, he will kill all the young (offspring of his predecessor) to make the mothers receptive again. This behaviour is rare in whales and dolphins. They are not monogamous, females mate with several different partners; which means that the males don’t know who their own offspring are. Thus by killing young calves, they would run the risk of actually killing their own baby. However, there have been occasional exceptions reported of male humpbacks harming or even killing young calves. In a lot of those cases it is probably accidental – calves may get caught up in-between the mother and over-excited, rowdy, testosterone-fuelled males. So we were quite worried for the little one as we watched this mum being pursued closely by two huge males. She zig-zagged, moving very fast, then made a beeline directly for our boat, dived underneath us and popped up a mile away on the other side! As we tried to catch up to see what was happening, the males started falling behind and eventually turned and went their separate ways, leaving mum and her baby alone. As she started to calm down she let us get close, in fact brought her baby right up to us, maybe seeing the large boat as protection. We were happy to see that mum had managed to keep the baby safe and unharmed. Hopefully the rest of their journey will be less stressful for these two!
Eco Ranger Ina