Humpback Bonanza

A story from Ted Cheeseman.

Humpback whale feeding frenzy

Ted has created Happywhale, a citizen science network for identifying humpback whales by the color patterns on their tales. He can even tell us where a whale has been (to Baja or perhaps San Francisco Bay), but when over 100 gathered in Monterey Bay to feed at the same time, Ted was totally awestruck.

TED CHEESEMAN currently runs Cheeseman’s Ecology Safaris, a quality safari company started by his parents, and has worked in the company, in various capacities, over the past few decades. However, he is also focusing much of his energy on citizen-science based Happywhale, (happywhale.com) a fluke-matching program he founded, to try to better understand our whales through individual identification.

Ted was born in Mountain View, not very far from his current home, and grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He’s been moving closer to the Monterey Bay ever since, in five mile increments. If he ever gets rich enough, he plans to move the next seven blocks for an ocean view!

Ted got his masters degree in tropical terrestrial ecology from Duke University, but through working in Antarctica he became more ocean focused. His father was a zoology professor with a passion for large terrestrial animals and marine mammals, with a love of animal behavior. Ted grew up hearing stories of elephant seals, their biology and behavior, among many other stories.

Ted went out on Monterey Bay a lot with his family when he was young, but always struggled with seasickness. However, he always liked being on the water more than he disliked being seasick. As an avid surfer, Ted manages to get out on the Bay on a regular basis, and leads annual whale watch trips for Cheeseman’s on Monterey Bay each summer. He also leads expeditions to Antarctica and the Arctic, and tours to the Caribbean to swim with humpback whales.

Ted is currently pursuing a doctoral degree studying humpback whales.

 You can watch Ted’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/ltcesE_VUzY

 HUMPBACK BONANZA!

 When it comes to special wildlife encounters on Monterey Bay, it’s hard to pull out something so disproportionally memorable, because among whales it’s all so grand. But not so long ago, July 17 of this year, I was fortunate enough to be out. I’m actually not out on the water that much, but I was fortunate enough to be out that day, which was the day after a month of non-stop winds and kind of nasty conditions. And then there was this glorious day. As we traveled up towards Soquel Canyon, we just started seeing more and more and more whales, humpbacks particularly, but I also saw a blue whale.

And given this work that I’ve been doing on individual ID with Happywhale[1], I was very focused on photographing flukes and identifying individuals and trying to figure out who we were seeing. So I was busy shooting. As a naturalist on the boat, I was trying to talk to people at the same time, announcing stuff.

Often times what I will do is photograph a whale and then show people the fluke, particularly if we see one with killer whale rake marks and that kind of thing. But this day it was like, there wasn’t time for that. Literally I didn’t eat all day. Every time I turned to talk to someone I felt like I was missing an encounter. So my father, who co-lead, the trip was the one talking most of the day, because he’s a good talker, and I was doing the shooting.

It was hard to tell really, as it was, if we were seeing the same whales over and over again, because it was all happening so fast – whales all around us. It was an eight-hour boat trip, and we took our time to get up towards the canyon. Probably from 9:30am when we started to pull away heading towards Moss Landing and then 2pm down back to Monterey, it was just non-stop, all whales, all the time feeding all around us. And remarkably, blues mixed in with the humpbacks. Humpbacks in groups of twos, fives, tens, and so we realized it was quite an event we were witnessing while we were out there.

But, honestly, the specialness of it didn’t strike us until after, while I was looking through photos and Happywhale and working with a couple of interns, UC Santa Cruz students. We started pouring over the photos and dividing them up, divvying them up into individuals. And our first pass, separating everything, we came up with potentially 140 individual humpbacks! Many of those turned out to be the same whale sighted repeatedly throughout the day. But after pouring through my photos, images from Kate Cummings, and images from a bunch of individual contributors, including Monterey Bay Whale Watch’s images, and a few of Kate Spencer’s photos, we’d come up with 102 - and with Jodi’s photos, your photos too - we came up with 102 individual, identifiable humpbacks. And there were a handful more where the flukes weren’t high quality enough to really say anything definite.

And having divided up the blue whales, there were at least ten different blue whales in there. What was particularly amazing to me is that over this last year we’ve had a really high rate of re-sights, but with those 102 humpbacks something was different.

Over the past year we had an increasingly high re-sight rating. When we started this project, it was something like a 30% re-sight rate, and it’s gone up from there, such that on any given day a whale in Monterey Bay has a 40-60% chance of being known to us.

On this day, something totally different happened. 88% of the whales had not been seen, as far as we know, in Monterey Bay prior to that day, this year!! This was based on looking at all of Kate Cummings’ and Kate Spencer’s whales from the year, and all the whales from Jodi, of your whales, that we’ve done for the year.

So my experience of the day was astounding, but the concept of the day that was most memorable to me is that you have this wind event, which is generating upwelling, which is pulling the food to the surface and creating the incredible productivity of Monterey Bay. But what happened, with the whales you know, when the wind stopped, for whatever reason, it’s like a dinner bell rang and the whales came in from offshore. The whales came in! One was a whale that hadn’t been seen for 26 years, one of our longest timed re-sights for the Pacific Ocean -1987 to 2016!!

There was just this incredible abundance of whales, like a different population, and that to me, really makes me wonder if there’s sort of a fabric of communication there among the whales. What’s happening? What do they hear that has them suddenly come just streaming in, right there super concentrated around Soquel Canyon, feeding?? And then they leave!! They were done. A handful of those whales have stuck around, but for the most part, most of them appeared to have left.

I’d love to know, but just being able to witness that was very special.

Thank you for sharing your story with us Ted!

[1] Happywhale is a web-based citizen science platform built to create an engaging, rewarding user experience that motivates the sharing of cetacean photo-ID images. This effort is conducted in collaboration with Cascadia Research Collective, Allied Whale and fifteen other research groups.