Natural Perspectives:

Vic and I went whale watching Sunday with the Orange County Society for Conservation Biology. We went on Capt. Dave Anderson’s Dolphin Safari out of Dana Harbor. I’ve gone on a lot of whale watching trips, but this was by far the best.

Those of you familiar with the habits of our local cetaceans are probably wondering why we would bother going whale watching in August. The most familiar whales in our area are the migratory California gray whales. The gray whales don’t come back from Alaska until October. At that time, they’re headed south to their breeding lagoons in Baja and are generally too far offshore to be seen. December to early May is a better time for viewing gray whales as they migrate back north through Orange County’s coastal waters.

But we weren’t looking for gray whales. Our target was a whale of a different color. We were after blue whales, the biggest creatures to have ever lived on this planet. They grow to 100 feet — the length of a typical yard in Huntington Beach. They outweigh T. rex. And they’re right here off the coast of Southern California.

Capt. Dave knows where to find these giants of the deep. He was the first to begin spotting blue whales on a regular basis in Southern California about seven years ago. Since then, those once-rare sightings have become far more common.

It seems that the big blues are summering off our coast, plying the waters between Orange County and Catalina. In years past, they spent their summers in Monterey Bay, but the whales seem to have moved south. Now they’re more likely to be seen off our coast. They winter off Costa Rica.

Blue whales are baleen whales, which means that they feed by taking in huge gulps of water, and then strain it through the baleen in their mouths. The baleen acts as a filter to keep the krill in their mouth while the water is squeezed out. The whales then lick all the krill off the baleen with their enormous tongues. To grow to their enormous size, which is often more than 100 tons, they eat 4 tons of krill a day.

On our trip, we were thrilled to see a mother whale and her calf. This “baby” was about 40 feet long but even at that size is probably still nursing its mother’s milk. The calves stay with their mothers for three years, nursing for the first seven to eight months.

Blue whales’ milk is 50% butterfat. In comparison, whole cows’ milk sold in stores is 4% butterfat. With milk that rich, those baby whales grow fast. They gain an amazing 8 pounds an hour. That’s not a misprint. They gain 200 pounds a day. They aren’t weaned until they have grown to a length of about 52 feet and weigh 23 tons. That’s a big baby.

Planet Earth almost lost its blue whales. In the early days of the whaling industry (think Captain Ahab and Moby Dick) blue whales were simply too large and too fast to catch. But the invention in 1868 of the exploding harpoon gun changed things. By the early 1900s, blue whales were being hunted with a vengeance. In the year 1931, the high point of blue whale hunting, 29,000 blue whales were killed. After that, harvest of blue whales sharply declined. These magnificent beasts had been hunted nearly to extinction.

The population of blue whales may have been 350,000 at one time. Hunting reduced that number to an estimated 3,500 individuals. In 1966, blue whales were given international protection. Their numbers have slowly climbed back to 5,000 to 10,000 in the Southern Hemisphere and 3,000 to 4,000 in the Northern Hemisphere.

But these facts and figures don’t give you a feeling of what it was like to be out on the water with the leviathans surfacing and blowing so close to the boat that we could hear them breathe. And what an awesome breath it was. They blow a plume up to 20 feet tall as they clear their blowhole. The whale stays at the surface for several minutes before diving back down for another huge mouthful of krill. The long body looks like a submarine gliding just under the surface. Yet despite their 70- to 100-foot-long body, they have a tiny dorsal fin that is only about a foot high.

For me, the blue whales were the highlight of our trip. But for Vic, it was the dolphins. The dolphins we saw were common dolphins, beautiful, small dolphins with white patches on their flanks. The dolphins came right up to the boat to play in the bow wave, swimming under the catamaran. Many jumped completely out of the water, tail swishing rapidly. We didn’t just see one or two.

At some points, we could see hundreds of them at a time in every direction from our boat.

In addition to common dolphins, there are two other dolphin species that can be seen regularly in Orange County waters, Risso’s dolphins and bottle-nosed dolphins. Pacific bottlenosed dolphins are here in the winter.

In addition to blue and gray whales, Capt. Dave often spots fin and minke whales, as well as the occasional killer, humpback, false humpback and sperm whales.

We have a spectacular world of wildlife living just a couple of miles off our coast. And Capt. Dave goes out in search of it every day.

To get a preview of what you might see on one of Capt. Dave’s Dolphin Safaris, visit www.dolphinsafari.com.

Be sure to watch the live streaming video of his trips at www.whalewatchingtv.com.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected] .