Sperm Whale Seismic Study (SWSS)

Summer Breeze Daily Reports - June 18, 2005

Our day started with another quintet of whales, which we picked up around 4:00 and tracked until the morning. We could see that these were not the same group that we encountered yesterday as they did not show any of the same marks on their heads and backs. However, they had one thing in common with yesterday’s animals: they had no intention of fluking. Instead, they shallow-dived repeatedly or logged at the surface in a tight group. Unfortunately, this time we were not able to wait until they began feeding dives and displayed flukes, since a thunderstorm threatened. Rather than shutting down our operations for the duration of the storm, and hoping to pick up the group again later, we decided to leave these animals and avoid worst of the weather. We sailed ahead and between several storm cells until after lunch time, when we began our regular acoustic monitoring again. By 16:00, we had picked up clicks; we went into tracking mode and soon spotted the first blows. As it turned out, this was a dispersed assemblage of around four animals. One of them shallow-dived on first approach but we got ID photos of the other three, one of which was a tagged individual: the aerial and base of a satellite tag being clearly visible just below the dorsal fin on the right hand side. The tag had a white tip and black stalk, a color code which will allow it to be recognized.  We could also identify the whale from fluke photographs as being MTB 36, which we first photographed last year.