Image Credit: Jared Towers
By Sarah Sharkey
A sperm whale was spotted in the waters of Johnstone Strait in British Columbia. The last sperm whale known to be here was in 1984, which was confirmed only by an audio recording.
Jared Towers, an ecologist, heard the calls of this whale with his colleagues first. He had this to say about the encounter, “Personally, I’ve worked and lived in this area almost all my life, over 30 years, and I’ve never known of a sperm whale sighting in this area or in any coastal waters of British Columbia. Like they say, seeing is believing. We knew it was there because we could hear it, but you get a whole other appreciation for it when you’re face to face with an animal of that size.”
The team worked hard to track the whale by the hydrophone. Eventually, they followed the calls to a juvenile sperm whale that was about 24 feet long. An impressive feature of these massive creatures is their heads which make up about a third of the size of their bodies. Their huge head holds a gigantic brain that weighs about 17 pounds.
The whale has been hanging out in the channel for a week, but no one is sure why he is there. The best guess is that he followed a dense food source into the channel and will stay until that runs out. For now, the ecologists are contented to just watch this impressive creature live peacefully around the resident killer whales.
Learn from our source here.