There were simply a few seemingly small plumes of water blowing out of the sea in the distance, a faint “pfft” sound on the wind as each plume popped into the air. Our expedition leader for the trip along Greenland’s eastern coast, the polar explorer Greg Mortimer, announced over the loudspeakers: “There is a group of about 20 to 40 whales about a kilometre ahead on the starboard side of the ship; come out to the observation deck to have a look.” As we pulled closer, it became increasingly obvious that Greg and his team had underestimated the number of whales. The plumes multiplied and spread, the slippery backs and blowholes of the humpback whales coming into view below them, until the ship was surrounded.
There weren’t 20 whales or 40 whales, but hundreds, maybe even 1000. The captain cut the ship’s engines, and all we could hear was the splash of fins, the “poof” of whale breath, and the occasional “whoa, over there” from passengers and crew members. We had travelled to Greenland with New Scientist Discovery Tours to see a total solar eclipse.
Just four days earlier, the group, along with the entire crew and staff of our ship, the Sylvia Earle, had stood transfixed and in awe as the moon hid the face of the sun and the sky grew dark in the middle of the day. I thought that would be the most astonishing thing I’d see during the two-week voyage. The most breathtaking photos of the total solar eclipse Since about 2000, the population of baleen whales, which use a sort of natural sieve in their mouths to filter their food from the water, has exploded in eastern Greenland.
This is most likely happening because the ice that used to cover Greenland’s eastern coast, rendering it inaccessible to whales and ships alike, has receded significantly in the last few decades, while at the same time the warmer water in the area has produced a huge influx of the krill and small fish that make up baleen whales’ diets. This is obviously bad for many species of Arctic wildlife, whose habitats are rapidly shrinking, but for baleen whales, which winter in much warmer equatorial waters, it is like a magnet drawing them to feed. Heide-Jørgensen’s recent work has shown that the number of humpback whales in the region is up to about 4000, leading to feeding frenzies in which they, along with fin and minke whales, consume about 1 million tonnes of food during the four months they reside there each year.
That was precisely what we saw. As each whale neared the surface, it would first exhale into the sky, then turn on its side, opening its mouth to take in a huge draught of water. The entire front half of the whale went from a streamlined triangle shape to a bulging, rippling pouch of sea as it closed its maw.
The next part of this so-called lunge-feeding behaviour happened underwater, where we couldn’t see it, but the water rushed out through the whale’s baleen, leaving the tiny creatures that constituted its lunch trapped inside. In the end, we saw one last humpback whale fluke splash a few metres ahead of the ship, and then they were past us, the white patches on their fins glistening an otherworldly aquamarine through the water. We got under way again, stunned by what we had just witnessed, as they turned back into a copse of distant plumes and then disappeared.
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