We were very fortunate to have three good days of offshore weather off Cape Hatteras over this past weekend – some of the nicest conditions we have seen in a long time. Monday was particularly good, with mirror-like conditions for much of the morning. Days like this can be few and far between, so we made the most of it.
We took advantage of the excellent conditions to deploy six satellite-linked dive recorders on goose-beaked whales. These tags collect information on depth every five minutes and transmit these data to orbiting satellites. We can also estimate the location of the tagged animals via satellite. So, we are now nicely set up for a planned Controlled Exposure Experiment (CEE) trial with a Navy destroyer this weekend.
We re-sighted several known beaked whales over the weekend and saw some mothers with young calves. In one particularly energetic group, we watched as two male whales breached and then pursued a female with a very young calf. We seldom see such exuberant social behavior at the surface in this species, so we were in rapt attention. Could it have been an infanticide attempt?
You never know what you will see offshore, and this weekend was no exception. On Sunday, we came across two adult male sperm whales while searching for beaked whales in the Gulf Stream. One of the whales had just submerged, but we were able to obtain photographs from the second whale, which had some interesting perforations on its fluke, perhaps from a past encounter with killer whales. We will send our photos to our colleague and friend Dan Engelhaupt from HDR, who collates a catalog of this species in the western North Atlantic.
