Whale watching is booming. Here’s how to do it responsibly.
These tours are generally beneficial for whales, but they can also stress them out. Here’s how to ensure that your trip does more good than harm.
These factors can make it especially hard for travelers looking forward to a long-awaited trip on the water. However, there are things you can do before setting sail to ensure an unforgettable experience, while helping to protect the animals for the future. Here’s what to know.
A whale watching boom
Whale watching didn’t become a tourist activity until the 1950s, when California’s former military outpost at Cabrillo National Monument became the world’s first public whale watching site. Other posts popped up along the coast, paralleling the migration path of gray whales. Soon, enterprising boat owners (many of them fishermen) began taking people out for a couple hours in between fishing seasons.
Nearly hunted to extinction, gray whales and their conservation success story contributed to a whale watching boom across the country by the 1990s. Whale watching continues to grow around the world today, with an average of 13 million people annually participating in an industry that generates over $2 billion globally. In Alaska alone, half a million visitors shelled out $86 million in 2019 to stan over humpbacks and minkes feeding and socializing in majestic fjords.
These days, over a hundred countries offer a catamaran or zodiac sail to glimpse a sudden mist of sea spray on the horizon, a graceful tail fluke slipping under the ocean’s surface, or—the holy grail—a humpback bursting out of the water.
(Whale watching is having a moment—in New York City.)
Indeed, since whale conservation rallied in the 1980s, whales have taken on near-celebrity status (a breaching humpback even starred on a 2022 U.S. postage stamp). Star quality aside, they’re also protected under U.S. law, notes Elliott Hazen, a National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) marine ecologist, who took the postage stamp photo and has worked on reducing the risk of ship strikes on whales and entanglements from fishing gear.
“Whales offer innumerable benefits in terms of ecosystem roles, carbon sequestration, and carbon cycling in addition to tourism, funding, and cultural importance,” Hazen says. “So it’s really hard to actually quantify how important whales are, but there’s no question that they are a huge part of our coastal culture.”
These “ecosystem engineers,” as marine biologist and Nat Geo Explorer Asha de Vos calls them, support healthy marine environments. A whale’s dive-and-rise movements stir up all kinds of tasty nutrients from the depths of the ocean to the surface. Released in plumes, their poop fuels phytoplankton—a foundational food source for all marine life. In its lifetime, a whale can capture about 33 tons of atmosphere-warming CO2. When it dies, its body sinks to the bottom of the sea, where the CO2 stays trapped.
“Even one percent increase of phytoplankton productivity [can] capture the CO2 equivalent of two billion trees,” Jean-Michel Cousteau, president of Ocean Futures Society and honorary president of World Cetacean Alliance, writes in an email. “More whales mean more whale fertilizer enhancing the productivity [of] and improving fisheries and sustaining atmospheric oxygen for us all.”
(It’s the world’s newest whale species—and it’s already endangered.)
Responsible whale watching can help shed light on these factors. Experts on whale watching vessels educate the public and can help foster a lifelong love of marine life. In many instances, tour boats are the first line of defense when it comes to spotting and reporting entanglements and injuries. They also collect important data, typically in the form of fluke photos for scientists to track, but also just by reporting species they see.
That happened on a recent tour in Monterey Bay, California, says Hazen. A whale watching group spotted a North Pacific right whale, one of the most endangered large whale populations in the world, with just 30-35 individuals left. “That’s another opportunity for gain because the whale watching vessels are there on the water way more often than any of us scientists can be,” says Hazen. “So it’s a really important resource for understanding how the environment is changing, and how the top predators that we care about often are responding to it.”
But it isn’t perfect. While watch watching tours yield a “net positive,” says Hazen, vessels can still contribute to problems like noise pollution, which can stress animals when they’re feeding or resting. In terms of conservation awareness, it’s an expensive leisure activity that can exclude many people.
(Why Canada is making it harder to go whale watching.)
How travellers can help whales
So how can you ensure that your next whale-watching trip does more good than harm? For starters, travellers should familiarize themselves with the rules of their destination.
Voluntary education group Whale Sense has its own certification program and lists responsible tour guides in Alaska and the Atlantic on its site. You can also look for outfitters around marine sanctuaries or Whale Heritage Sites. The latter is a certification program run by the World Cetacean Alliance, a conservation organization that currently recognizes six destinations around the world. While these sites don’t place regulations or enforce them, they “highlight the world policies that are already put in place [to] reduce the impacts of climate change, ship strikes, [and] entanglement,” says Cousteau.
However, climate change can force migrating mammals to move out of sanctuaries; and these safety zones have different levels of protection, notes Hazen. Contact may be prohibited, for instance, but activities like crab fishing may still be allowed, which could lead to entanglements. “It’s not a fault of the sanctuaries themselves, it’s a byproduct of the sanctuaries act not having full ‘protected area’ benefits,” he says.
(Humpback whales face major setback from climate change.)
If you still aren’t sure, contact local coastal museums, such as the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, California, a marine sanctuary and Whale Heritage site, and the Pacific Whale Foundation’s citizen science program for responsible ways to tour. You can also contribute to whale health via cell phone apps like iNaturalist and Whale Alert, which reports deceased or distressed whales to NOAA.
If all else fails, look for spouts and flukes from shore, like the beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, or hotels like Turtle Bay Resort, located within the Hawaiian Island Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. In North America, the coastal Whale Trail guides visitors along a hundred lookouts (some with lodging managed by local communities), from British Columbia down to the birthplace of whale watching in Southern California.
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Sperm Whale
SIZE RELATIVE TO A BUS:
- IUCN RED LIST STATUS:
- Vulnerable
- CURRENT POPULATION TREND:
- Unknown
Sperm whales are easily recognized by their massive heads and prominent rounded foreheads.
Spermaceti and Diving Capabilities
They have the largest brain of any creature known to have lived on Earth. Their heads also hold large quantities of a substance called spermaceti. Whalers once believed that the oily fluid was sperm, but scientists still do not understand the function of spermaceti. One common theory is that the fluid—which hardens to wax when cold—helps the whale alter its buoyancy so it can dive deep and rise again. Sperm whales are known to dive as deep as 3,280 feet in search of squid to eat. These giant mammals must hold their breath for up to 90 minutes on such dives.
These toothed whales eat thousands of pounds of fish and squid—about one ton per day.
Whale Pods and Behavior
Sperm whales are often spotted in groups (called pods) of some 15 to 20 animals. Pods include females and their young, while males may roam solo or move from group to group. Females and calves remain in tropical or subtropical waters all year long, and apparently practice communal childcare. Males migrate to higher latitudes, alone or in groups, and head back towards the equator to breed. Driven by their tale fluke, approximately 16 feet from tip to tip, they can cruise the oceans at around 23 miles per hour.
These popular leviathans are vocal and emit a series of “clangs” that may be used for communication or for echolocation. Animals that use echolocation emit sounds that travel underwater until they encounter objects, then bounce back to their senders—revealing the location, size, and shape of their target.
Whaling Target
Sperm whales were mainstays of whaling’s 18th and 19th century heyday. A mythical albino sperm whale was immortalized in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, though Ahab’s nemesis was apparently based on a real animal whalers called Mocha Dick. The animals were targeted for oil and ambergris, a substance that forms around squid beaks in a whale’s stomach. Ambergris was (and remains) a very valuable substance once used in perfumes.
Despite large population drops due to whaling, sperm whales are still fairly numerous.
This video captures a rarely-seen sperm whale birth. It’s beautiful.
The last scientific record of a sperm whale birth was 1986, without audio or video. New recordings of the whales’ behavior during the birth will give researchers new insight.
After following the whales’ codas, or clicks, the team came upon an unusual scene: A group of 11 sperm whales—which usually surface alone or in pairs—all aligned in rows facing the same way, apparently trying to be quiet as the birth occurred.
It was just “a day in the life of a sperm whale, but one of those days that we’re never there to see,” says Gero. The CETI team plans to publish their research in a journal.
Witnessing a sperm whale birth is very rare: The last scientific record was from 1986, without any visual or audio recordings. The species, whose males can reach up to 60 feet long, is still largely mysterious: it was only in 1957 that we learned sperm whales even make sounds.
Scientists on Project CETI are now working to analyze audio recordings of the whales’ vocalizations during the birth with video taken via drone and aboard the catamaran. Such information is crucial for understanding more about the species, which the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists as vulnerable to extinction, in part due to marine pollution and ship strikes.
By capturing millions of whale codas—the animals’ clicks—and analyzing them, Project CETI aims to completely decode sperm whale language, part of a wider effort to actually converse with whales in their own tongue.(Read more about the groundbreaking effort.)
Gero and colleagues focus much of their research around the Caribbean nation of Dominica, which is home to an estimated 35 family units. There are less than 500 whales in the Eastern Caribbean population, mostly adult females with some calves, says Gero, who founded the Dominica Sperm Whale Project in 2005.
After witnessing the birth, Gero says he feels “enormous gratitude.”
“Moments like this sort of allow you to sort of take stock and realize what an honor it is to do the work that we get to do, and how much I do care about the whales that I work with.”
A new sperm whale is born
It was a summer day like any other for the Project CETI team—their expert crew went out to sea on two boats, one geared with special microphones that hang deep below the vessel, where sperm whales spend a majority of the time. The team deployed two drones in an effort to record a whale for the 10 to 15 minutes they surface for air each hour.
After tracing the quiet codas to the group of 11 whales, the team was initially puzzled: The cetaceans come together to socialize occasionally, but that’s a lively affair where they roll around, run their jaws along each other, and touch each others’ tails.
“One thing that dolphin species or whales do when they’re being hunted by things like orcas is they go quiet. Because if you’re being hunted by a supremely acoustic being, making noise will tell right where you are,” says Gero.
Instead, a tiny whale head emerged, and microphones picked up a sudden chorus of codas. The group lifted the calf to the surface to breathe as they moved below, acting as a kind of moving sidewalk to keep the calf afloat. The baby’s tail or “fluke,” critical to swimming, was still furled from being compacted in utero.
“When she comes out her fluke is like, all floppy, like, the cartilage in the musculature isn’t there the whole body just seemed limp,” says Gero.(Learn more about Gero’s work deciphering whale language.)
The scientists don’t yet know the sex of the new baby, but because sperm whale groups are matrilineal, Gero hopes for a girl. “In fact, for the first few minutes, I was worried she was stillborn… that made me very nervous. And and then like, eventually, we saw her breathe and kick.”
Groundbreaking new data
The crew watched the whales carry the newborn for hours, which David Gruber, National Geographic Explorer and founder of Project CETI, says might be the adults making sure the newborn is stabilized.
Each calf is precious: Sperm whales have some of the longest gestation periods in the animal kingdom, at 18 months, and usually only one calf is born at a time. (Read about more astonishing animal pregnancies.)
“I think it is quite profound. As something to make people care about sperm whales, watching her mother and her family welcome a new baby” is wonderful, says Tom Mustill, zoologist and author of How to Speak Whale. “Because this birth took place in this area that CETI is working, it’s going to be part of the biggest ever animal behavioral dataset,” says Mustill, who isn’t involved with the project.
Through projects like CETI and the citizen science app Happywhale, which helps ID and track whales from tourists’ photos, Mustill says “we’re both getting the enormous datasets that allow us to do statistical analyses on behavior, communication, and biology that were previously restricted to chemistry or physics.”
As for Gruber, he hopes stories like this will increase public interest in these social whales, which even have cultures similar to ours.
For instance, sperm whales—the species in Moby Dick—have often been perceived as villains, not incredibly complex animals that care deeply for their young, Gruber says. “How wrong were we?”
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How humpback whales use bubbles as a tool
A new study confirms a theory that humpbacks are a tool-using species, as they deploy nets of bubbles to catch fish and krill.
Chimpanzees use sticks to fish for termites, sea otters crack open clams with a rock and dolphins use sea sponges on their noses for protection while foraging on the ocean floor. A new study adds humpback whales to the list of non-human species that use tools. Humpbacks may not only use a tool, but create it from their environment by blowing bubbles.
Around the world, humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) use bubble-nets to trap certain prey such as krill, herring, and young salmon, sometimes in coordinated groups and at times alone. The whales dive down below their prey and swim in circles while releasing bubbles from their blowholes to create a rising curtain. The curtain creates a visual barrier that tricks the prey into thinking there’s no escape. Once the prey is tightly corralled, the whales lunge through the bubble-net with open mouths to swallow their meal. This feeding behavior has been observed for decades, but the precise mechanics behind it are difficult to study and have long remained a mystery.
While watching humpbacks feeding “it looks like a big scattering of bubbles and it doesn’t look like it’s very structured,” says Andrew Szabo, a marine ecologist who leads the Alaska Whale Foundation and an author on the study. But that all changes when you add drones and underwater cameras, he says.
While tool-use in animals can sometimes be challenging to define, scientists now tend to think about describing tool use as using an external object that isn’t attached to anything to change the shape, position, or condition of something else. It’s been suggested before that bubble-netting is using a tool, but “this paper strengthens that position,” says Janet Mann, a marine mammal biologist at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. who has studied aquatic tool-use extensively.
Feeding frenzy
To get a better look at the behavior, Szabo and the team used 20-foot poles to attach specialized underwater suction tags on whales in northern Southeast Alaskan waters. These tags, equipped with 4K video cameras, hydrophones and sensors to record movement in three dimensions, as well as temperature and depth, collected data for up to 24 hours before detaching. The scientists combined the tag data with aerial footage captured by drones to precisely measure the timing, structure, and size of the bubble nets made by solitary whales.
And it turns out that these gentle giants adjust the speed and spacing of their bubble emissions to trap prey more effectively, the researchers report August 21 in Proceedings of the Royal Society Open Science. By altering the bubble rings, the whales may be able to catch seven times the prey on average in just one gulp. The whales are conserving energy, having to lunge fewer times, says Szabo, who is also a National Geographic Explorer. This efficiency is crucial for humpbacks, as they migrate thousands of miles and need to capture enough food during the summer and fall in Alaska to sustain themselves throughout the year.
“They have so much control over how they’re doing this,” says Lars Bejder, another author a the study and marine mammal biologist who directs the University of Hawai’i at Manoa’s Marine Mammal Research Program. “They are increasing the frequency of the pulses as the net gets smaller, to lessen the mesh size of how the prey can escape. And that’s really cool.”
For the team, humpbacks’ ability to use bubble-nets as tools speaks to the whales’ cognition and complexity, which is often overshadowed by other marine mammals, like dolphins, Szabo says. “They are remarkable animals, doing remarkable things.”
Caloric capture
Interestingly, the whales did not consistently use bubble-nets. In Alaska, only about five to 10 percent of the whales bubble-net feed. “It’s certainly the rarity, it’s not the commonality,” Bejder says. “This is true in all populations, as well.”
During the three-day period when the team deployed tags, they observed 70 to 80 whales engaging in bubble-net feeding. However, just a week later, the same whales had stopped using this tactic. Why was this the case?
When and where humpback whales use bubbles may have to do with prey density. “It takes a long time to deploy these nets, and if the food is sufficiently dense where you don’t need to use a net, you might actually do better not using it,” Szabo says. However, if the prey aren’t very dense, using bubble-nets allows the whales to exploit an otherwise unavailable resource. “You can actually use these nets to make something that was not profitable, profitable to feed on,” he says.
While impressive, it’s not particularly surprising, says Jan Straley, a biologist and professor emerita at the University of Alaska Southeast who has studied humpback whales since 1979. Humpback whales are known to vary where they deploy bubble nets based on prey location, environmental conditions and density. She has observed young whales learning from their moms and appear to pick up new techniques from peers.
“I think these whales are really, really good at knowing their environment and knowing the physics of their environment. They know the physical properties of the water column and how sound travels,” she says. “They’re really smart for their world.”
For instance, in a region outside Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, humpback whales feed in coordinated groups but do not use bubble-nets. Instead, they utilize tides and currents to corral fish.
In the 1980s, New England’s humpback whales developed a technique called lobtail feeding, where they slap their tails before bubble feeding. This behavior may have started as the whales changed their diet from herring to sand lance and spread through social learning.
The humpbacks’ ability to change their feeding strategies and use tools to access otherwise unreachable prey might explain why they have fared better than other large whales since the whaling era. This adaptability could also give them a better chance of adjusting to climate change— as long as the prey don’t disappear entirely. “Prey is declining. We know this,” says Szabo. “Whales are getting skinnier.”
