“Trail with the Whales”
Ready for a vacation? How about a seven-month getaway? During your trip, you’ll swim 6,000 miles south, and then later, swim 6,000 miles north. Sound like fun? Then let’s go. We’re trailing with the whales.
Pretend you’re a pregnant female gray whale (cow), 45 feet long and weighing 45 tons. You’ve spent the summer months in the chilly Chukchi and Bering Seas near the Arctic Ocean, gorging on a ton per day of one-half inch Crustaceans and worms - tiny creatures that live on the muddy ocean floor. You’re increasing your blubber thickness by several inches, enough to allow you to exist for months with occasional feedings
As summer transitions into fall, daylight shortens, food becomes scarce and Arctic ice creeps into your idyllic feeding grounds. You’d better not dally too much longer or you’ll get trapped. Also, you’re expecting a calf (baby whale). Because you’re a mammal and warm-blooded, if you give birth before you reach temperate waters, your baby won’t have enough insulation to survive the frigid ocean.
With two or three friends for company, you start swimming south along the coast for the longest migration of any mammal. The pregnant females leave first, followed by mature adults of both sexes and then by juveniles, until over 20,000 whales stream southward. You average 100 miles a day as you follow the continental shelf.
Relating to a human perspective, mileage-wise, this trip is equivalent to you as a
 pregnant woman from the Mendocino Coast walking five miles an hour to the nearest birthing hospital - in Vancouver, British Columbia. Except to get there, you must travel on foot by a predetermined route from Fort Bragg, Calif. to Miami, Florida on the Atlantic Coast, and then continue walking the distance back to the Pacific Coast at Vancouver, British Columbia where you finally give birth.
However, as a gray whale, instead of trekking across countries, you’ll hug the coastline as you swim south to Baja. You’ll occasionally rest in short 20-minute naps. You might feed opportunistically while migrating, and even bottom feed a little once you reach the food-sparse lagoons, but the blubber you gained during the summer will sustain you. Mostly, though, you swim day and night for two months. Still sound like fun?
Traveling south, you notice that some juveniles decided not to migrate and dropped off near Seattle and Portland, becoming year-round inhabitants. Youngsters don’t feel the urge to mate until they reach 5 to 11 years of age, so why bother making the trip?
 As you pass Fort Bragg and Mendocino, you salute with your fluke to say “Hi, and thanks.” People love you there. Humans spend hours watching for you to swim by, wishing you well as you make your migration to warmer, saltier waters. In 1976, during the Mendocino Whale Wars, Mendocino residents boycotted Japanese imports until the Japanese agreed to stop killing gray whales, at least off the California coastline.
At strategic locations, human field biologists count you and your companions as you swim onward, pleased with your increasing whale population.
The ocean is sometimes a noisy place where sounds travel quickly and at great distances. Your communication of clicks, grunts and groans mingle with motor and engine vibrations, especially when passing busy land communities like Los Angeles. Small boats harass you at times, getting too close for your safety.
The sound you hear now is too loud for a small boat. This vibration hurts your ears. A large ship-bottom with whirling blades fills your left vision. Collapsing your lungs, you dive to avoid a collision or a slice across your back. As you power yourself under the ship, you concentrate on watching for fishing gear, salmon set nets and crab pot lines, serious risks for entanglement, and difficult to see in the sea’s shifting lights and shadows.
Two months into your journey, you arrive at the maze of lagoons on the west coast of Baja California, Mexico. You choose Laguna Ojo de Liebre for your winter home, also known as Scammon’s Lagoon, another historical spot for your species’ struggle to survive. In the mid- 1800s, Captain Scammon nearly hunted your ancestors to extinction, but he realized that the “devilfish” who rammed his ships in trying to save their babies revealed intelligence, caring and a nurturing behavior reminiscent of humans protecting their young. Scammon reformed, evolving from hunter to naturalist, making the lagoons safe again for calving and breeding.
After a 12-month gestation period, your calf slips from your womb into the warm, salty water. An auntie whale assists your 1,500-pound, 15-foot newborn to the surface for its first breath. The high-salt content of the water makes your baby more buoyant so that he can easily nurse your rich, 53 percent butterfat milk the texture of stinky cottage cheese (human milk is only 2 percent fat). He gains 50 to 60 pounds a day, building up insulating blubber to protect against Arctic waters.
Training is vital; you and your calf swim against the strong lagoon current to build up strength for the long trip north. Humans traveling in boats come out to pet your little one; you allow them to fuss over him, but you remain nearby, making certain they don’t separate you from your calf. After two to three months, your baby grows to 19 feet long.
By March, immature whales begin the northward migration, followed by the adult males and impregnated females. Giving your baby as much time as possible to gain strength and length, you and your calf are the last to leave, along with the other new mothers and their calves.
You hug the shoreline even tighter to protect him from the orcas (killer whales) who consider California Sea Lions and baby whales their favorite delicacies. Unlike the gray whales that have baleen for filtering out the tiniest of amphipods for food, orcas have razor-sharp teeth, latching onto and drowning helpless calves or injured whales. Scars from previous killer whale bites and tooth-rakes mar your skin alongside the resident barnacles, proving you’re a survivor.
You travel more slowly to accommodate your calf, but the patches of black and white moving along the edge of the continental shelf warn you of danger; 12 to 15 orcas lurk in the murkiness, impatient for you and the other cows and calves to cross the deeper waters of Monterey Bay.
To prepare to travel a 20 minute time-span without breathing, you force out a one-second exhale through the two blowholes on top of your head, your lung gas condensing into a 10-foot spout above you. You suck in a one-second inhale of fresh oxygen. You take two more breaths to encourage the oxygen out of your lungs and into your bloodstream. In a desperate last breath, you squeeze your lungs extra hard. The whooshing sound of the 15 foot spout sounds loud even below the surface, and with a lung-filling inhale, you shove your tail into an extra-hard upward flip to propel yourself over the edge of the continental shelf and into the Bay.
The powerful up and down movements of your fluke (tail) drive you swiftly through the water, but the smaller-bodied Orcas close in quickly. You feel a thump against your side as your calf is rammed against you from a blow. You frantically roll onto your back and urge your calf up onto your stomach. While the sun slides above you across the sky, you struggle to protect your baby from the Orca’s savage attacks as you work your way closer to the coast and, at long last, over the shallower continental shelf again. The killer whales retreat into deeper, watery shadows, haunting you like a pack of sea-wolves, hungering for you to make a fatal error. Still sound like fun?
Wounded but alive, you and your calf continue north up the coastline. Grateful to be back at your summer home, you enter the Bering and Chukchi seas where food has proliferated in your absence. Whale lice that live among the barnacles on your skin clean the wounds caused by the orca attacks, helping the gashes heal into scars. For five months through the summer and part of the fall, you gorge on food, replacing the eight tons of blubber you lost while you were on your seven-month “getaway”.
Your baby nurses until he is about eight months old. He then learns to bottom feed like you by swimming to the ocean floor, scooping up a mouthful of mud and using his tongue to press out the silt, leaving tiny crustaceans caught in his filter-like baleen - plus gravel and a few small rocks until he perfects his technique. Your calf gains weight and strength for his upcoming exodus as a juvenile.
As summer transitions into fall, daylight shortens, food becomes scarce, and Arctic ice creeps into your idyllic feeding grounds. Pregnant females start leaving in twos and threes for the calving-breeding lagoons in Baja. The urge to mate lures you to join the stream of more than 20,000 migrating whales. The cycle of life continues.
By Carolyne Cathey, MAPA Executive Director |