I’m not a whale biologist. My very first trip to Antarctica was on this big Russian vessel. That was when I was still working on post-digested krill. I was at my microscope in this little tiny lab sorting poop, which I’d been doing for several hours. I had a little tiny porthole window in my lab, and I just happened to look up at the same moment that I saw a splash. I didn’t know what it was, but it was an unusual splash.
I got up and I looked out the porthole and I saw a giant fore-flipper come out of the water and then hit down, right next to the boat.
The cruise that I was on was mostly a fish survey, so I was just this weird person off to the side, sorting fur seal poop, but everybody else was up on deck processing the net haul of fish that they had just brought up and they were focused on what they were doing. Nobody was looking up—they were in this little lab on the deck of the ship sorting their fish—so nobody had any idea that there was this whale right next to the ship. I ran up to the deck to try to get people’s attention. I was yelling, “Hey!” Nobody was listening to me even though I was screaming at them. Finally I just screamed, “WHALE!” That got people’s attention. “Whale! There’s a whale!” I screamed, pointing off the side of the deck.
Everybody abandoned what they were doing and ran up to the bow of the ship. There were two humpback whales putting on an amazing show.
They weren’t breaching, but they were feeding and they were flapping their pectoral fins and just kind of twirling around on the surface of the water. They stayed there for maybe a good 20 minutes hanging out. I don’t know if we just sailed the ship through a big patch of whatever they were feeding on, but it was quite remarkable. That was probably the closest and the longest I’ve seen whales and it was cool that it was in the Antarctic. I took pictures but I couldn’t get good pictures of the whole whale because we were too close. I could get, like, a part of a whale.
That will always stick out in my memory as one of my favorite times that I saw whales. I grew up in Southern California, so I’ve been out on whale watching trips and I’ve seen gray whales off of our coast here a lot. But nothing was like that.
-Jen
This post was adapted from a voice recording in the World Krill Day 2023 episode of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here.
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