Maxx K. | M/V Kestrel | 06/29/2022 | 10:00am
Forgive me, but I’m gonna geek out here during this blog. Bigg’s Killer Whales are obviously fascinating for a myriad of reasons but I’m never more impressed than when I get lucky enough to see a T-Party of whales. A T-Party is essentially an informal nickname given to the circumstances when several families of Transient whales (related or not) come together for whatever purpose; feeding, socialization, reproducing, family cookouts, etc.
Now, BC Bigg’s are a notoriously cryptic and stealthy ecotype of whales, tending to travel in silence to prevent other species and prey from detecting them.
Therefore, big ol’ reunions like the one we saw this morning are so so interesting to me. When we arrived on scene with the whales, approximately 10 whales were reported which we would later to come to identify as the T0124A2s, the T099s and the T065B families of Killer Whales. How did they coordinate this reunion?!
Did they call out to one another? Was this a coordinated reunion? “Let’s meet North Pender and Moresby Islands at 11am on the 28th when the tides are doing this and currents are doing that.” We just don’t know!
We know these whales are immensely intelligent, with the second largest brains in the animal kingdom (after sperm whales) and they second largest brain-to-body ratio (after humans) but there’s still just so much we don’t know about them! We will never be able to completely understand whales until we can think like whales. Yet we navigate the world in completely different ways! Imagine if we had to put up with tides and currents with every move we made...woof.
If I think too hard about it I'll give myself a headache so for the meantime I’m just going to enjoy the whales I’m seeing in front of me, breaching and spy hopping. We sat amongst the emotive families for several minutes before departing, us back towards Friday harbor and the whales continuing their journey northward.