Though it may sound very glamorous to be in Antarctica studying humpback whales (ok, it is a little glamorous), what you might not hear as often is that it is TIRING. We were able to collect good data from all arms of the project, from hydroacoustics to ADCP to visual surveys to yes, our very first successful tag deployment! We’ll leave you with one useful nature fact we learned today that a group of penguins is referred to as a ‘waddle’ on land and a ‘raft’ in the water (although we prefer the terms ‘flurry’ and ‘blizzard’ depending on the size of the group).įinally – hi to Jamie’s grandmother and Happy Birthday Wyatt and Dan!Īloha all, from one of the few non-Dukies in the science party! Andy hit the nail on the head, today was a banner day for our cruise. We’ll be back on the water tomorrow for more adventures. As a result, they are amazingly fat one small whale approached the Gould this morning to have a look at us and we were amazed by its rotundity (is that a real word?). So, in the waning days of autumn, they are busy feeding and storing energy for their long fast. They won’t feed again until they return to these cold, prey-rich waters next spring. Soon most of the whales will leave the Antarctic and head north to breed in the tropics. It snowed steadily all day today and a few of the sleepy whales managed to accumulate an inch or more of snow on their backs.
#Whale bullet points for word full
The whales apparently took full advantage of this superabundant food supply last night by dawn, when the krill dropped back down to below 100 meters, the whales had stopped feeding and were lounging around everywhere in the Cove, snoozing at the water’s surface.
Just before we went to bed last night, we watched a massive krill swarm rise to the surface, creating a layer about 200 meters thick and filling the entire cove. Tag on!Īll these predators are here for food.
I’ve never been so busy during a survey we had more than 100 sightings and our data logging program finally gave up the ghost late this afternoon, as if it just couldn’t handle another entry.
And we didn’t even manage to survey the entire Cove.
#Whale bullet points for word plus
We counted 133 humpbacks in the Cove today, plus thousands of Gentoo penguins and who knows how many seals. Piccard Cove is a tiny place perhaps 6 by 10 kilometers and it is chock-a-block full of whales, penguins and fur seals. While the tagging team was out deploying our first DTag, and the hydro-acoustic team was mapping krill, Dave, Eletta, Lindsey, Reny and I spent the day surveying Piccard Cove for whales, penguins and seals aboard the ASRV Gould. The home page on the ship’s intranet said that today was a good day to be a scientist a truer word was never spoken.
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