A baby whale put on a show for some lucky people on July 12, 2022 in Kachemak Bay. (Photo by Brian Herbst)
Brian Herbst had an Alaska vacation banner. He caught rockfish and halibut, saw moose and bears, stayed in a yurt — and, in a moment of perfect weather, managed to snap a photo of a minke whale in a breach hanging over the waters of Kachemak Bay.
The snapshot shows the parallel of the whale above the water, as if competing in a belly-dive contest, doing a plank in the air, or floating across the bay like a hovercraft.
On July 12, Herbst was on the Danny J ferry, heading for lunch at The Saltry restaurant in Halibut Cove, when the captain reported a whale in the distance. Using the camera from his daughter’s high school yearbook and a borrowed lens, he began taking pictures.
As the boat turned, the whale began to swim toward him.
“I was like in the front row of it and I was like, ‘I’m going to take this thing, cha cha cha cha cha,'” Herbst said, replaying the moment during a video interview from his home in North Carolina on Thursday morning.
He knew he had landed the perfect shot.
[A killer whale was headed toward a sea otter in Kachemak Bay. Then the otter hopped on a boat — and stayed there.]
Herbst then sent the photo to The Saltry, who posted the image on their social media page. From there, the photo began circulating online, garnering thousands of likes with captions such as “LEVITATE” and “minke whale goes vroom.”
A minke whale breach is rarely captured on camera, said Mark Weber, a marine mammal researcher and instructor. at the Kachemak Bay Campus of the University of Alaska Anchorage.
He said it was a “remarkable picture”.
The photo shows the whale’s sharp dorsal fin on its upper body, as well as a white band on its fin — a defining characteristic of minke whales, according to Weber. While the whale is parallel to the water, it is actually tilted slightly to the side, showing off its light belly.
It’s not known why the whales breach, come out of the water and fly into the air, Weber said. It could be a way to signal to other whales by noisily entering the water or “some heightened state of arousal or display of exuberance,” he said — but that’s just speculation.
Weber even receives reports of minke whales in which people say they have seen a large dolphin, not knowing it was a minke and unable to estimate its size. At first, Herbst thought the whale he was seeing was a dolphin, based on what he had seen in North Carolina.
Minke whales are shy most of the time, ignore and avoid boats, so people rarely notice them.
[A creeping mass of insect larvae near a Denali lodge raises the question: ‘Am I hallucinating?’]
The minke whale is the smallest whale in Alaskan waters. They weigh up to 20,000 pounds and are typically 25 to 30 feet long as adults, far smaller than their huge counterparts such as humpbacks, blue and gray whales.
And they’re fast, Weber said. Small whales feed by rushing at high speed towards groups of smaller fish such as herring and anchovies, swallowing large bites. They then strain the water through their baleen, a claw-like structure that hangs down in pieces and acts as a sieve, he said.
Back in Kachemak Bay, the baby whale breach was followed by a halibut taco lunch for Herbst and his family, who were in Alaska for his mother’s 85th birthday. They reached Homer just as the weather began to turn windy and cold.
“We just hit it so perfectly,” he said. “It was just made to happen.”
A baby whale put on a show for some lucky people on July 12, 2022 in Kachemak Bay. (Photo by Brian Herbst)
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