Humpbacks Give a Rousing Performance Off Block
(07/09/2009) The bubble clouds whale watchers were told to look for appeared like huge, light-green blossoms in an otherwise emerald-green sea.
 Russell Drumm Photos
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Above each, shearwaters and petrels hovered expectantly.
At one point just after noon and a couple of miles south of Block Island on Sunday, one light-green blossom erupted not 20 yards off the Viking Star’s port bow, another off her starboard beam.
Whale watchers, as expectant as the birds, and not knowing which way to turn, oooohed, when up from the center of the closer cloud appeared the black, gaping maws of a humpback whale, her calf, and another whale that Arthur Kopelman, president of the Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island, identified as a “juvenile escort.”
Two other humpbacks broke the surface, held their mouths open to the sky like the others — gullets full of hundreds of pounds of sand eels — while the birds, tempting Jonah’s fate for a few scraps, kept just outside the cave-size mouths until the whales slipped slowly forward.
Their black backs rounded for a shallow dive, the closest exhaled with a whoosh that sprayed the Viking’s passengers, the whale’s flukes disappearing beneath the waves to stunned silence and a strong west wind.
For more than two hours, the Viking Star was virtually surrounded by feeding humpbacks, three separate groups, one with 15 of the graceful mammals, the other two smaller, for a total of 29 as counted by Dr. Kopelman and his volunteers. The young whales stayed close to their mothers. They were at an age, the professor said, when mother’s milk was being abandoned in favor of fish.
It was a propitious maiden voyage for the first series of whale-watching trips to sail from Montauk in seven years.
The Viking Fleet of Montauk is working in concert with the Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island. A Viking boat will leave the dock at 9:30 a.m. and return at 3 p.m. on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays through early September.
In the 1980s and ’90s, whale-watching excursions from Montauk were popular, first led by the Okeanos Foundation for Marine Research beginning in the late ’70s, then, starting in 1996, by the Coastal Research Society.
Dr. Kopelman made the transition. He has studied whales for nearly 30 years, the same length of time he has taught biology and ecology at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. He is also an adjunct professor at Dowling College in Sayville, where he teaches a marine science course about the whales of Long Island.
Dr. Kopelman said that, beginning in 2002, migrating whales moved out of range for Montauk-based boats. “They were there, but about 45 miles out.” They followed the food supply, he said, which consisted primarily of herring in winter and sand eels in summer, although humpbacks consume a variety of fish, including squid, butterfish, mackerel, and the small shrimp known as krill.
“Last year they returned,” said the professor, who kept up an informative patter throughout the trip while at the same time shooting short bursts from his motor-driven digital camera.
The photos captured the black-and-white pattern of pigmentation on the whales’ tail flukes, each a unique design, for the Coastal Society’s catalog. It contains 174 humpbacks, many identified in the South Channel between Nantucket and George’s Bank, where the society has been leading whale-watching trips in recent years.
The professor explained the difference between toothed whales, Odontoceti, including sperm whales that are known to migrate past Montauk in winter, and Mysticete, whales like the humpback. The latter push their fish-filled gulps past baleen, fringed plates the consistency of thick “fingernail tissue” that hang from the roof of the whale’s mouth and strain out its food.
“They take in about 10,000 gallons in each mouthful and force it out through the baleen screens, leaving the food inside. Humpbacks will consume about 8,000 pounds of fish per day,” Dr. Kopelman said, as whale watchers dropped their own jaws at the sight of an immense mother and calf feeding only a few feet away. Adult humpbacks can weigh up to 70,000 pounds.
The whales continued to rise up through the bubble clouds they created by blowing air from their blowholes. The clouds herd and corral their prey. “They work together cooperatively,” Dr. Kopelman said, their bubbles creating a virtual fence that keeps schools of small fish in place.
On Sunday, the Viking found the humpbacks feeding in 150 feet of water. The boat’s electronic fish finder marked an enormous school of sand eels that stretched from the surface all the way to the bottom, which was why whale watchers were treated to such a display, the professor explained. There was no need for them to dive deep — “the entire water column is filled with food,” Dr. Kopelman said.
If each of the 29 humpbacks consumed 8,000 pounds of fish on Sunday, the pod would have put a 232,000-pound dent in the sand eel population, according to the professor’s calculations.
At times, the whales rolled onto their backs and showed their white, wing-like pectoral fins, which make them extremely maneuverable. The species’ generic name is Megaptera novaeangliae, or the long-winged New Englander.
“They are very buoyant, which is why they kick their tail up to dive,” the professor said. As a result of this, and because each whale has a unique design not unlike a fingerprint, they are easily identified.
It is not known why humpbacks breach, or launch themselves entirely out of the water as a few did on Sunday. They return with a tremendous splash. To free themselves of parasites, perhaps, Dr. Kopelman said was one theory. To call their young was another.
Humpbacks can live to be over 60 years old. Fin or finback whales, another species that migrates past the East End, can live to 90, and bowheads up to 200 years, Dr. Kopelman said.
With the creatures themselves as a living, blowing, feeding, and defecating (the professor pointed out) backdrop, Dr. Koppelman told watchers that cetaceans, an order of mammals that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises, evolved over 55 million years ago from land ancestors.
During the same era that dinosaurs began going extinct, early cetaceans had four limbs. “They fed coastally. They are closely related to hippos.” Twenty species of cetaceans have been identified in the waters around Long Island,” Dr. Kopelman said.
The whales continued to feed, roll, breach, slap their tails, and blow as the Viking Star headed west back to Montauk. The presence of storm petrels and shearwaters riding the updrafts off the faces of waves had been a good indication of whales, as Dr. Kopelman had predicted on the way out.
He said he was tired but exhilarated. He had to migrate home to Sayville through Independence Day traffic, but would be back among the long-winged New Englanders the next day.