A rarely seen blue whale has been spotted off the California coast, placing the gargantuan creature thousands of miles away from where they are normally found during Christmas.
The blue whale was captured on video by Monterey Bay Whale Watch, which posted the footage to Facebook on December 19. Also seen in the video was a variety of other species encountered on the same excursion, including a humpback, a group of gray whales, and a pod of Risso's dolphins.
"Starting off our AM trip we had a very friendly humpback whale that approached that vessel on its own while we sat in neutral with the engines off and gave us quite an amazing 'mugging' for over an hour! Then on the way back into the harbor we encountered a rare December blue whale!!" Monterey Bay Whale Watch wrote in the caption of the post.
Blue whales are the largest animals on Earth. They can grow to as long as 98 feet, the length of a Boeing 737-500 aircraft or three school buses lined up in a row. Hydrodynamic modeling has suggested it may be impossible for an animal to physically get larger than a blue whale, due to metabolic and energy constraints preventing enough oxygen reaching all parts of the body, and the animal being unable to consume enough food to sustain itself.
"A blue whale is typically something we see in the summertime," Evan Brodsky, Monterey Bay Whale Watches' resident cinematographer and naturalist, told Newsweek. "This past summer we saw a blue whale on maybe one out of every five trips. There are only about 10,000 blue whales left in the entire Pacific Ocean. Blue whales use Monterey as a feeding grounds to feed on krill in the summer and in the winter they usually migrate south to warmer waters to mate and give birth."
The whales normally spend the winter in the warmer waters off Central America.
Blue whales are filter feeders, using their huge sieve-like baleens to filter krill out of the water. Unlike other cetacean species, blue whales are generally seen alone, only accompanied by calves after birth, rather than large social pods.
"To see one in our area in December is very rare. Blue whales are an endangered animal as it is, they are not as common as the humpback whales we usually see every day," Brodsky said.
In 1926, there were an estimated 140,000 mature blue whales in the oceans, but their populations have decimated by the whale hunting trade. The International Whaling Commission eventually banned all blue whale hunting in the 1950s and 1960s, but their populations have struggled to recover since. They are listed as "endangered" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list.
They still face a number of threats outside of hunting, including being hit by large ships, impacts from man-made noise, and consumption of chemical pollutants.
The other species of whales seen in the video are more commonly seen off California during the winter months, as they don't migrate.
"On our PM trip we encountered the same blue whale again a few miles to the west which led us to a feeding humpback whale which then led us to 5 southbound gray whales on their annual winter migration!! (Which means the gray whale season has officially started) after we spent some time enjoying the gray whales we ran into a group of about 70-100 Risso's Dolphins!" Monterey Bay Whale Watch said in the Facebook post.
The post noted that the whales had approached the vessel on their own accord, and the boat was in neutral with engines off at the time.
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Jess Thomson is a Newsweek Science Reporter based in London UK. Her focus is reporting on science, technology and healthcare. ... Read more
