 | We were on the boat every morning at 9:30am. We went out once a day, sometimes twice, and one day we went out three times. We saw Pilot Whales on every trip. |
 | Pilot whales are the second largest member of the Delphinidae Family. The largest is the Killer whale. Pilots grow to between 6-9 meters. They eat mainly squid and find food through echo location. One night during the trip I had this dream that we were studying Killer whales, and that I had been chosen to write a TV documentary about it. It was a lot of responsibility, and I had writer's block. I really didn't want to do it, and I was relieved when I woke up and discovered it to be a dream. I also had a dream that week that I was on Much Music and I had to sing a song in french to the tune of "We Will Rock You." I was really nervous because I couldn't remember the french word for a thousand. |
 | It wasn't all fun and games, we did have work to do. We were in teams of two and each team was researching something different. Everyone was using either photo-ID data, or acoustics, for their studies. Me and my partner used a depth sounder. Our study was so basic, it's sad. You can read it here. |
 | This is a nice picture. It shows the difference in body sizes. Compare the dorsal sizes between the two. You can also get an idea of the rounded head shape. |
 | Another nice picture. You can see the blow hole. They make noises exactly like you'd expect when they surface. It's the sound we make when we surface and spit water from our mouths. Whales have blow holes because the nostrils underwent telescoping and traveled to the top of the head. Baleen whales have two blow holes, while toothed whales only have one. Manatee nostrils didn't undergo telescoping, so they don't have blow holes. |
 | The whale with the tiny dorsal is a juvenile. The mothers will always keep between the offspring and the boat. There was a few calves we kept seeing during our trips. They were called fetal fold calves, because they still had wrinkles from the womb. They were tiny, so cute, and rather uncoordinated. They'd kind of flop on the surface instead of gracefully breaking it. Also, their dorsal fins flopped over. I don't have any pictures to show, though. You'll have to take my word for it. |
 | This would be a good pic for photo-ID if it were closer. You can see the markings on the dorsal. Dorsal fins are scored, and only fins with scores higher than 3 can be used in photo-ID studies. This eliminates quite a few individuals, so studies based on photo-ID data are really only studies of identifiable whales, and not the whole population. Having said that, taking pictures for a photo-ID study is hard. Our prof had a new digital camera that cost more than my entire net worth. We each got a chance to use it. It sounds easy: you watch the whale come up, focus on the dorsal fin, then take the picture. Except you're on the upper deck, the boat is pitching, and while pilot whales are relatively slow, they aren't just gonna stand still for you. At first I got a lot of pictures of water where the whale had just been. After awhile I ended up getting some good pictures. It takes a lot of practice. |
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Perhaps one of the better pictures, if not a little out of focus. The whales would get really close to the boat. Sometimes they'd swim right for us, going under the boat, or surface beside us out of nowhere. One day we had stopped the boat to put the hydrophone in, and one whale surfaced right beside the boat, and kept doing shallow dives and surfacing close to the boat in different places, and people on the boat were running back and forth to look at this whale. One of the guys in the class said, "He is laughing at us." And the next time the whale went under, there was a burst of Pilot whale noise on the hydrophone and it sounded a lot like laughter. |
 | We saw a finback whale one day. Finbacks are the second largest mammal on earth (the largest is, of course, the Blue whale). They are baleen whales and don't tend to breech like humpbacks. They have spray that goes about 20 feet into the air, so that's how you spot them. They aren't a good species for watching, because they don't usually let the boat get too close. We got this close, and that was pretty good. |
 | There was one day that we didn't go on the boat at all. The winds were really bad on the water. On land, though, it was a beautiful day. We did a two hour hike called the Skyline Trail. It was a path through fields and really stunted woods. It ended at a cliff, looking out on the ocean. You could see down the coast and the Cabot Trail. It was beautiful. We saw moose everywhere on the trail. You'd be walking along, and glance over and there would be a moose, grazing and ignoring you completely. It was incredible. |
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 | Usually the last 20 minutes of a boat trip would be spent going along the coast looking for seals. We did see a few seals. We also saw bald eagles, a black bear and a moose. The moose was perched high on the cliff. I think it was looking for whales too. |
 | This was the captian of the boat we used, Captain Mark. He was so very, very nice. For our study we needed to know the depth evey ten minutes, so we had to bother him to get it. He was so nice about it. And, on our last day, he took us out swimming and we got to jump off his boat. |
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On the day that we didn't go out, we drove for about 10 minutes down this coastal dirt road. There was a buddhist monastery there, but we weren't there during visitng hours, so we couldn't get a tour.
Instead we went to this place, I forget what it was called, not a monument but some other word. It was quite beautiful, and serene. It was meant to bring peace to the area, and give peace to the people who visit it. There was 59 principles carved in marble walls. They were principles forliving a good life and being a good person. There were things like:Don't be Predictable Don't Expect ApplauseQuite a few of them were negative like that. They reminded me of a U2 song called Numb, which gave us my favourite piece of advice, "Don't expect: suggest." That's me in the picture, shielding my eyes from the sun. The next two pictures are group shots. I won't identify people, because I didn't ask anyone if they minded. I will say they were a fun bunch of people and it was a great trip. |
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