Blue Whales Sighted!

“Life is unpredictable” – yeah, we know. Start with weather in San Francisco, and you’ve kicked that cliché up a notch. Now add weather + marine life + the Farallon Islands and anything goes. Surprise - we saw 3 Blue Whales on what I gloomed was going to be a full-out foggy, no-show day! Well, not a complete no-show - the Harbor Seals were on-cue cute, just as we left San Francisco Bay.



Blue Whales; the largest animal on the planet – now or ever. Up to 32.9 meters (108 feet) long, 150 tons, a potential 80 year life span; awesome to image, more so to see. Consider that SF Bay Whale Watching passengers had parked their puny cars a mere 27 miles away from the gigantic Blue Whales they were about to see that day.



Before last Saturday I’d never seen a Blue Whale. Some years pass without even one confirmed Blue Whale sighting out at the Farallones. Turned upside down this year – we’ve had sightings for 3 straight weeks and there were sightings earlier in the year too. Observers from the Marine Mammal Center report that currently there are 12 – 15 Blue Whales out near the Farallones!


NOAA has now made it official that we are in an El Nino weather pattern; the thinking is that the warmer seas are producing less food and therefore sustaining fewer marine mammals. As of the middle of September, NOAA reports “current conditions, trends, and model forecasts favor the continued development of a weak-to-moderate strength El Niño into the Northern Hemisphere fall 2009”. But this has not been our experience - we continue to see many whales, in fact, in record numbers.


The other big story from Saturday was the sighting of an enormous “red tide” – a miles long, mile wide swarm of visible krill, the cafeteria special that day – the reason the Blues were sticking around. The krill feed on phytoplankton; the whales feed on the krill. That’s the reason the too-many-to-count Humpback Whales were happily lunge feeding – flinging themselves upward, mouths agape, throat pleats extended into full “Jiffy Pop” mode to swallow as many krill as 10,000 gallons of water will hold (the water is filtered out, the ¾ inch krill are goners).


Although they didn’t appear on Saturday, we’ve been seeing Gray Whales all summer, well past the time when they’ve usually passed by on their way to feeding grounds in the Bering Sea. Naturalists and researchers tell us that we appear to have a 3 member resident group of Gray’s feeding at the Farallon Islands.


At least one observer tells of seeing a Gray Whale vertically feeding, flukes aloft, in shallow waters just off the Farallones. Gray Whales like to sift through bottom sand in search of amphipods (small crustaceans) and tube worms found in bottom sediments. Come out with us soon, maybe you’ll catch sight of an upside-down Gray Whale AND a Blue Whale!

Photos and text by Kathleen Jacques.