Flip Nicklin: Once in a while, you had this eruption where 40 foot animal becomes throwing itself out of the water, tail and all, and you can not even remember your name.
Humpback Whales coming to Hawaii need come of a month without eating from Alaska and they are not feeding while they are here. So you are looking at the animals that are mating—they are having cabs, they are playing in the calm waters but they are not chasing food.
We are right at the breakwater next to Lahaina Harbor and that is their home, but where we worked is out here in the channel, between Lanai, Tolave, Molokai—maybe the best place to look the whales in the world. We have a big shallow area that used to be pretty calms and is the great place for whales, they like those shallows and it is protected.
Meagan Jones: Each individual whale have a completely different tail, just like your fingerprint. And that is how we can compare individual and that is how we identify individual whales.
Flip: Whale song is the most complex animal song there is. If you were to record one here, one in the Philippines, one in Mexico at the anytime of the year, the song would be essentially the same. So it is evolving all the time, it is evolving all through the ocean basin. How they do that? We have no idea.
The same thing the makes this a tremendous place for doing research also makes it a wonderful place to look at whales as a visitor.
For whale watching, the best time of the year is January, February, March, and into April. You just stay a hundred yards away from the whales. It does not mean the whales can come up to you and they routinely do. But you should not approach the whale within a hundred yards. The population humpback whales that visit Hawaii probably doubled in the last decade or so. They may never have been a better time to come here than right now.
It is 40 tons, 45, 50 feet long, so powerful and but also suborning and so gentle. They represent wildness and they represent mystery, they represent hope—it is a special animal.
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