Most of the time, we see the whales feeding on our tour, and it looks like a whole lot of nothing, since the majority of our humpback whales are feeding at depth, diving for krill and small schooling fish that make up the majority of their diet. Today was quite different, though, as we saw nearly every humpback that we came across lunge feeding right at the surface!

Humpback whales are rorqual whales, or members of the Balaenopteridae family. This means that they are filter feeders, having around 400 plates of baleen hanging from the roof of their mouth, which they use to filter their food out of the large volumes of water they collect while feeding. Each mouthful for a humpback can take in up to 20,000L of water! The water will get filtered out, pushing through those dense plates with all the yummy food getting caught in the plates themselves. Once all the water is filtered away, they can then swallow up all the food they just captured. Each day, they will consume nearly 1 ton of tiny critters, and even more if they are a female who is pregnant or feeding a calf. It’s estimated that about 18 hours out of a humpback’s day is spent feeding, with the other 6 hours left for sleeping, socializing, and travelling. Today it seemed like some of these whales were mixing socializing with feeding since two were very close together, and seemed to be using teamwork as part of their feeding technique. These two were Smoke/Squirrel (BCX2183) and Helen (BCX1710calf2022). While we watched, Squirrel seemed to be swishing the food right into Helen’s waiting mouth with their tail! This unusual behaviour isn’t something that we had witnessed before, although cooperative feeding in humpbacks isn’t unheard of. Especially further north, in areas like Alaska and Northern British Columbia, humpbacks will cooperatively bubble-net feed in large groups. These group feeding endeavours are typically led by a single individual who organizes the others through vocalizations, having them exhale below the surface, creating a circle of bubbles that the fish won’t pass through. They swirl in tighter, concentrating the fish, and then the humpbacks lunge up through, getting a great meal. This is a learned behaviour, so perhaps some day the knowledge will pass its way through the population down to our waters. For now, there is still lots of fascinating feeding to be seen.

Before spending time with the cooperatively feeding Squirrel and Helen, we found another lunge feeding whale, but this one was solo. Although we enjoyed our time with this whale, it never showed us much of its tail since it wasn’t going very deep beneath the surface. With no tail, it makes it much more difficult to be able to identify humpback whales, since there isn’t as much variation there. Hopefully, we will be able to use the dorsal fin, alongside the small corner of the tail that we did capture for this whale, to figure out who this little lunge feeder is!

There must have been something in the water today (and that something must have been lots of food) because in addition to the three lunge feeding whales we already talked about, there were also two more! These two were close to Helen and Squirrel, but they were also alone in their feeding. We saw them pop up from time to time with their mouths wide open, collecting all the delicious morsels from the water column. We were able to identify these two as Neptune (BCY1021) and Mow (BCY0523calf2023).

After all of these hungry hungry humpbacks, we continued on our way, heading towards a popular haul-out area known as Stinky Rock (aka Sea Lion Rock). From its second name, you can probably guess what we hope to find on the rocks here: Steller Sea Lions! Although they are supposed to be leaving our waters soon to continue to their breeding grounds, there are still a lot of them seen here. Pinnipeds like the sea lions and seals that we often spot during our tours are very consistent in where they spend their time, hauling out on the same rocky outcrops each day. They will occasionally leave the rocks, heading out into the water to fish. They will eat a variety of fish species, from larger animals like salmon to smaller fish like Herring. In addition to fish, Steller Sea Lions are known to occasionally grab cephalopods like the Giant Pacific Octopus and squids, although this is less common.

Our final stop on the tour was just before returning to Nanaimo, at the Gabriola Bluffs. Here we saw a variety of birds spending their time here, with lots of cormorants flying in and out from their nests along the tall sandstone cliffs, as well as the Bald Eagles tending to their nest. The nest has been very exciting this year, since there are two chicks this year. While this isn’t unheard of, it is slightly less common. It takes a lot of work to raise the chicks, and often they only have the resources for one. But with the smorgasbord of cormorants and gulls nearby, these two seem to be doing very well. They will be getting ready to leave the nest soon, so we enjoy our time with them while they are still here!

The onboard Marine Naturalist for the tour, Desarae Poier, captured some amazing photos of all the action throughout the tour, which are all available to view below!

June 22, 2025, 3:30 PM - Lunging into our hearts ❤