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Sperm Whale Seismic
Study (SWSS)
Summer Breeze
Daily Reports - June 26, 2005
Position at 27.48 90.37
We kept on monitoring regularly throughout last night and stopped only
for about an hour this morning, when we sat out a rain squall. Once out
of that, we kept moving slowly west in long north-west
and south-west
legs. Finally, just before 16:00 local time, we
picked up clicks and
soon after saw the first blows. The weather wasn’t exactly helpful with
constant winds above 15 knots and frequent white caps, which made
detecting blows rather difficult. Nevertheless, we spotted several
whales at the surface. However, the first couple of times the whales
fluked before we could get to them, again due to the heavy seas. Once in
the area where the
first whales had fluked, we kept spotting blows and
now were
close enough to approach the whales in time to obtain photo-ID
shots (see photo 1). Our estimate is that there were four animals
in
this dispersed group. A first glance at the photos shows at least three
different individuals. |
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One of the whales fluking up before we were in
the right position. Note the notch in the trailing edge of the right side of
the fluke. We did get a proper ID photo of this whale later in the day. |
One of the whales fluking in front of platform
A (Genesis). |
As of midnight, we are still tracking at least one of the
whales from this group, intending to stay with it through the night. If we
manage this, we plan to follow this group until we have a good estimate of
the group size and can be confident that we have identified all members of
the group. We picked up the group in the vicinity of the platform
A (Genesis), Photo 2, and at the moment, we are still only 6.5 nautical
miles west from that structure.
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