Up Close and Personal : Researchers and Whale Watchers Are Getting Extraordinary View of Apparent Comeback of Humpbacks and Blues in Santa Barbara Channel

Those aboard the Condor couldn’t have asked for anything more.

The sun was shining, the ocean sparkling, blue and calm--and wild and wonderful creatures were popping up all over.

“Lots of friendly activity,” said Fred Benko, skipper of the Santa Barbara Sea Landing-based vessel, flipping the pages of his log to a particularly good day last month.

Friendly activity? He and his customers had humpback whales putting on a show practically within arm’s reach, leaping, rolling, poking their knobbed heads out of the water, waving and slapping their giant tails.

Sleeker, much bigger blue whales were shooting plumes of mist 30 feet high.

“We shut the boat down, and they came for an hour or so,’ Benko said of two curious humpbacks. “Then a blue whale came and it stayed for an hour.

“We’re finally ready to leave, and here come four more humpbacks, and they played with us for hours, spy-hopping, breaching, showing their flukes. . . .”

And so it went for Benko, his crew and passengers. And so it continues for anyone venturing into certain areas of the Santa Barbara Channel. So far, at least, the bulk of the activity has been between Santa Rosa Island and San Miguel Island.

This is the third summer in a row that whales have appeared to gorge on krill, tiny shrimplike crustaceans that thrive in the nutrient-rich water of the channel.

It is the second year they have shown in such force as to provide the public with a fairly reliable opportunity to view some of the largest and most remarkable creatures in the world--and scientists with a convenient opportunity to study the mysterious mammals without having to follow them.

“There are very few places we can reliably go and see whales like this,” said Jay Barlow, head of the coastal marine mammal research project for the National Marine Fisheries Service. “What we’re seeing now [are] animals that are normally much farther offshore. A shift in oceanic conditions and it could change back.”

Meanwhile, whale watchers and scientists are making the most of the phenomenon. An NMFS research vessel left for the area last Thursday. Benko has been running trips since the whales came in June, and the Ventura-based Island Packers began running them late last month.

So far, the public has been slow to respond, perhaps because it hasn’t been informed--or perhaps because it is more accustomed to watching the seasonal migration of California gray whales, southward in the winter and northward in spring and early summer.

In any event, what they are missing are much larger whales--grays reach 45-50 feet, humpbacks 60 feet and blues 100 feet--and in the case of the humpbacks, much more active whales.

Humpbacks, so-called “singing whales” because of the males’ ability to vocalize eerie-sounding songs that last up to 20 minutes, can often be seen breaching and spy-hopping, or popping their heads out of the water as if to get a better look at life above the surface.

The humpback is an expert fisherman who uses a “bubble-net” technique, blowing a circle of bubbles that acts as a giant net, which gathers krill or small baitfish at the surface. The whale then charges up to get a mouthful.

Blue whales are not as bold as humpbacks, but they’re not exactly shy, either. And they’re much more impressive up close given their immense size. Blue whales can weigh as much as 150 tons; newborn calves can be 25 feet long and weigh 7 1/2 tons.

On whale-watching trips, it might be pointed out that a blue whale’s heart is as big as a VW Bug and pumps more than 10 tons of blood through the mammal’s massive body. Its tongue is as big as an African elephant, weighing up to six tons.

It might also be pointed out that blue whales once numbered about 400,000, but they were slaughtered to near-extinction by commercial whalers. There are believed to be fewer than 12,000 swimming the world’s oceans today.

Humpbacks also were hard-hit, their numbers being reduced from about 100,000 to an estimated 10,000.

Both are endangered but are believed to be making slow comebacks.

Much less is known about blue whales than humpbacks, which are generally more accessible and therefore extensively researched.

Barlow said a crew of 14 is spending 30 days at sea--much of that time in the Santa Barbara Channel--trying to gather data that might give scientists a better understanding of the giant leviathans.

They are still unsure, for example, at what point blue whale calves leave their mothers. Another objective is to determine whether blue whales segregate according to size, as is believed. Another is to study their socializing habits.

A primary and long-term objective of all scientists, however, is to try to get a better handle on movements and populations of blue whales, a slow process thus far based largely on individual identifications derived from distinct markings through photographs and using mathematical formulas. Current estimates are crude, at best.

Humpback whales follow very definite migration patterns. There are an estimated 600 to 700 humpbacks that feed exclusively off California, and they spend each winter and spring in breeding grounds off Central America.

Blue whales are also known to travel south each winter and spring to Baja California and Mexico, but it is suspected that they may travel much farther. Nobody knows for sure because scientists have not yet matched animals that use California waters with any in Central America, or the central North Pacific or the Gulf of Alaska, for that matter.

John Calambokidis, founder of the Olympia, Wash.-based Cascadia Research Collective and a renowned authority on blue and humpback whales, has spent several years identifying individual animals through photographs. He said researchers have identified about 850 blue whales off California, and he estimates that about 2,000 feed exclusively off our coast, an estimate shared by NMFS.

“The exciting thing is that California now has the largest concentration of blue whales anywhere in the world,” Calambokidis said. “It used to be the Antarctic [with an estimated 180,000 animals], but whaling pressure decimated that population, and now there are just a few thousand throughout all of the Antarctic.”

Whaling pressure also is believed to have knocked the blue whales’ size down a bit.

Jim Gilpatrick, a fishery biologist with NMFS who studies and measures whales through aerial photography, said the larger whales were “killed right off the bat” during the modern whaling period, which began to subside in the past quarter-century and only recently ended.

He said blue whales in southern oceans generally are larger than those in the north. The largest measured off Santa Barbara last year was a 79-footer and the average length was about 70 feet.

Nobody ventured a guess as to how many whales--humpbacks and blues--are currently in the channel. It is believed that they are moving in and out from other areas.

“We’ve had animals in the Santa Barbara Channel, and one or two weeks later they show up in Monterey,” Calambokidis said. “Even when there is a continual concentration in the channel, our studies show that animals are coming and going.”

And as long as there is krill in the area, they figure to do so for some time.

“Last year, we saw them on every trip from June 1 to Oct. 1,” Benko said. “Every day except four, and those four days we had orcas [killer whales]. They didn’t want any part of the orcas.”