The Flickr Whale Image Generatr

This guy came up right by the ship. Had to zoom out!

This guy came up right by the ship. Had to zoom out!

This guy came up right by the ship. Had to zoom out!

This is HW-MN1307108, newly identified on our voyage. The round marks are from barnacles.

This is Genie (HW-MN1306882), named by a travel companion in memory of his wife, who was interested in genealogy. It was newly identified on our voyage. The pink is whale poo, tinted by the whale’s krill diet.

This is Genie (HW-MN1306882), named by a travel companion in memory of his wife, who was interested in genealogy. It was newly identified on our voyage.

This is Genie (HW-MN1306882), named by a travel companion in memory of his wife, who was interested in genealogy. It was newly identified on our voyage. The pink is whale poo, tinted by the whale’s krill diet.

This is Genie (HW-MN1306882), named by a travel companion in memory of his wife, who was interested in genealogy. It was newly identified on our voyage.

This is HW-MN1306951, newly identified on our voyage. It has survived an orca encounter -- the parallel white toothmarks on the left fluke tell the tale.

This is HW-MN1306951, newly identified on our voyage.

This is Yoda (HW-MN1307147), named in honor of our trip leader and guru Michael O’Brien. It was newly identified on our voyage. Many of the humpback flukes were snapped by 2 or more of us, but I was the only one who happened to catch this one. It was always a cooperative effort – as soon as anyone saw the whale they were watching as it rested on the surface arch to begin its dive, they would yell “fluke!” so others could get on it. Yoda was one of an astounding concentration of about 50 whales just off Elephant Island.

Appareya Restaurant, Nagasaki, April 2025: featuring Nagasaki Wagyu beef, whale meat, and motsu (intestines) stew

Blue Whales have a distinctive mottled pattern on their body which is apparently as unique as a fingerprint. So individual Blue Whales can be identified from photos and their movements between sightings tracked. You can see that the patterning and even colouration on these two are very different and distinctive.

I am very fortunate to have seen lots of Blue Whales, but even when there are several in the same vicinity, they usually keep themselves to themselves. The only time I have seen two Blue Whales together previously is with a mother and calf, where the size difference is obvious, like this: www.flickr.com/photos/timmelling/5519939108/in/photolist

But these two were big, adult Blue Whales, and were inseparable. And we know from their patterns that one is an adult male, and one a female. So I think this was courtship behaviour. This was in the Sea of Cortez off Mexico's Baja peninsula.

Seen against the looming bulk of iceberg A23a, this is HW-MN0701745, newly identified on our voyage (same whale as www.flickr.com/photos/anitagould/54459473490; humpbacks are identified by their unique fluke patterns).

A23a is currently the world’s largest iceberg. It’s about the size of Rhode Island. It stretched for as far as the eye could see; our ship took 3 hours to travel past it. A23a broke off of the Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986, but spent until 2020 grounded on the seabed. Then it started drifting north – slowly at first, with the pack ice, and then faster in 2022. It spent much of 2024 trapped in a gyre of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and then, in December, broke free into Iceberg Alley and headed towards South Georgia Island, like so many smaller bergs that we saw there.

We were not expecting to encounter it. However, in order to skirt heavy seas on the straight-line path to Antarctica, we ended up detouring east, which put the berg right in our path.

The iceberg not only makes its own weather – the air above it was cloudless, while all around us hung a low overcast – it also makes its own ecosystem. The surrounding waters were teeming with thousands of seabirds. As the iceberg melts, it sheds minerals picked up during its time on land as a glacier or from dust that landed on it. This fertilizes the phytoplankton at the base of the food chain, which is often limited by iron or phosphorus availability, and the resulting bloom reverberates up the food chain all the way to whales.

A23 has now run aground on the continental shelf just off South Georgia, where it will sit, melting and disintegrating, for many, many years.

An 11m tall sculpture of a whale made from waste plastic collected from the beaches of Hawaii. Its aim is to highlight that there is now more plastic by weight in the oceans than there are whales.

Created by artist/architect duo Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang.

The non-reclaimed elements, including the concrete base, are also low-carbon and sustainable.

Cathay Cargo B747-8F B-LJN waiting behind

Presumably a mother and calf.

A23a is currently the world’s largest iceberg. It’s about the size of Rhode Island. It stretched for as far as the eye could see; our ship took 3 hours to travel past it. A23a broke off of the Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986, but spent until 2020 grounded on the seabed. Then it started drifting north – slowly at first, with the pack ice, and then faster in 2022. It spent much of 2024 trapped in a gyre of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and then, in December, broke free into Iceberg Alley and headed towards South Georgia Island, like so many smaller bergs that we saw there.

We were not expecting to encounter it. However, in order to skirt heavy seas on the straight-line path to Antarctica, we ended up detouring east, which put the berg right in our path.

The iceberg not only makes its own weather – the air above it was cloudless, while all around us hung a low overcast – it also makes its own ecosystem. The surrounding waters were teeming with thousands of seabirds. As the iceberg melts, it sheds minerals picked up during its time on land as a glacier or from dust that landed on it. This fertilizes the phytoplankton at the base of the food chain, which is often limited by iron or phosphorus availability, and the resulting bloom reverberates up the food chain all the way to whales.

A23 has now run aground on the continental shelf just off South Georgia, where it will sit, melting and disintegrating, for many, many years.

A female humpback whale named Tornado that I saw on my whale watching trip from Boston in 2010.