Rowdy groups
We have begun seeing some rowdy group behavior. Vale has witnessed rowdy behavior on two different occasions now, where as I have only seen it on one trip. Rowdy groups consist of males trying to get next to the female in hopes of being the male that she chooses to mate with. How does she choose? Well, that must be one of the more frequently asked questions by people witnessing the aggressive displays and I truly believe the answer falls into the “you have to be a whale to know" category. But nonetheless, it is truly an impressive thing to witness. We spent an hour and a half traveling with two males vying for a female.
For us whale watchers, it was a great day because the three whales were spending much of their time at the surface and only going on short dives. They were also only traveling about 2 knots so it was easy to idle right along with them. We traveled with them for about 5 miles, watching their amazing behaviors of creating bubble curtains and displacing quite a bit of water as they surfaced.
The bubble curtains are thought to be aggressive display maybe to intimidate one another or "shield" a female from approach by a challenging male.
The other really great aspect of rowdy groups is that the whales engaged in this behavior tend to fluke up more then the whales not in rowdy grounds. And here in their breeding and calving grounds we see substantially less fluking then in their feeding grounds, so we were very happy to get some photo ID shots while documenting this amazing behavior.
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But kudos to the people who did their best to save him.