Whale Tale

"Class" is generally a loose term here at the Australia Centre. Sometimes class is class, consisting of three hour lectures and quizzes, but sometimes class is more like vacation. Luckily for us, our marine biology class has recently been more like the latter. September 10th, we borrowed the local whale watching boat in order to collect some plankton samples. We broke up into two groups. The first group was about 30 minutes late coming into the dock. We eventually found out that this was because there was thought to be a humpback whale that was possibly injured and stranded. They went to check it out, but couldn't find anything.

I was on the second trip. As we left, we all kept an eye out for the humpback. As we were watching, someone excalimed that they saw a dolphin fin. Our professor said, "...that wasn't a dolphin." Turns out it was a shark! It is very rare to see them surface like that, apparently.

Later, the captain of this ship lowered an underwater microphone into the water so we could listen for whale sounds. We could hear them singing! We knew they had to be (relatively) close. So we kept looking.

Eventually we saw spouts and eventually fins and tails! One of the whales breeched in the distance, but I missed it. We probably saw 15 or so whales migrating.

We were so excited about the whales, we almost forgot our origional purpose: to get some plankton. Here is our proffessor Danny (in OZ, profs and teachers are on a first name basis, which makes sense if you have ever met an Aussie) getting out the net. We skimmed the net on the surface of the water for a few minutes and got a jar full of plankton that we later looked at under microscopes.


Thanks to Kelly for the pictures!