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Alaska Sea Adventures

Focus on Whales with Dr. Adam Pack

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This is Dr. Adam Pack from the “Focus on the Whales” cruises and Professor and Chair (Psychology)
Departments of Psychology and Biology University of Hawai’i at Hilo.

Focus on Whales cruises are always a summer favorite. One of my highlights this past summer were working closely with my incredible group to document individually identified humpback whales from our mini-catalog and find out the life histories of these whales.

2023 represented my 15th Alaskan yacht cruise leading Focus on Whales in Southeast Alaska.

It’s always exciting for me to return from Hawai’i, where I live and teach at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, to the same waters my mentor Dr. Lou Herman and his students surveyed for humpback whales on their feeding grounds from 1980-1986.

During my first summer in Frederick Sound and Chatham Strait in 2007, I was amazed that many of the same whales Dr. Herman first photographed in those early years were still around!

In the years that followed those early pioneering efforts, it became clear that most humpback whales in Southeast Alaska spent their winters in the warm breeding grounds of Hawai’i.

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Over the years, with our Focus on Whales groups, I have traced the migratory destinations of individual whales across the 2500-mile journey between Hawai’i and Alaska.  

Our archival catalog of North Pacific humpback whales now numbers well over 25,000 observations of more than 7,000 individuals dating back to 1976! From this archive, Naturalist Jim Nahman and I developed a mini catalog of some of our most well-sighted and most beloved humpbacks.  

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Focus on the Whales Guides Dr. Adam Pack & Jim Nahmens

This summer, our group identified 12 of the 42 mini-catalog whales. For every sighting, we looked up the long-term history of the whale using the innovative and revolutionary automated online matching program “Happy Whale.”

Our discoveries included a whale we call “Dog face,” who has been sighted numerous times in Frederick Sound hunting schools of herring cooperatively with other whales using a loud feeding call and a bubble net, and who we have also seen in Hawai’i competing with other males for mating access to a single female in what we term a competitive group.

To witness a whale competing in one context and cooperating in another across thousands of miles is amazing. According to Happy Whale, Dog face, first sighted on August 27, 1996, in Alaska, has been sighted 54 times total in Alaska and nine times in Hawaii.

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“Dog face” also named “Equilibrium” and “Mahalo” in Happy Whale  sighted on July 24, 2023, the first of the mini-catalog whales our 2023 group sighted.

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Dog face photographed March 7, 2019 in Maui, Hawai’i competing aggressively with other males for a female.

June 26, 2023, we documented a whale we call “V cut,” a name we attributed to the distinctive notch out of its right tail fluke edge. It is known in Happy Whale as “Finger and Epilmeletic.”

We observed V cut participating in a cooperative feeding group of humpback whales off the Big Creek shoreline in Frederick Sound. When we uploaded V cut’s fluke image into Happy Whale, it revealed that V cut had been sighted 79 times in Alaska but only once in Hawai’i.

Thinking this a bit odd, when I returned to my University of Hawaii at Hilo Marine Mammal Laboratory
, I combed through hundreds of photographs of humpback whales we are in the process of uploading to Happy Whale, and lo and behold found V cut way back in 1991 in Hawaii.   

These recognizable whales are just a few of the many from our catalog that our Focus of Whales cruises photographed in 2023 and helped match and trace between Alaska and Hawai’i.

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V cut photographed by Jana Johnson on June 26, 2023 hunting herring cooperatively along the Big Creek shoreline in Frederick Sound Alaska.


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“V cut” photographed in Hawaii on March 23, 1991 was a mother to a newborn calf in a competitive group.

They warmed our hearts, filled our minds with wonder, and became the subject of numerous discussions over many amazing meals as we celebrated these long-lived majestic mammals aboard the MV Northern Song.

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