© 2024 Hawaiʻi Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Talk Shows:Listen again to your favorite talk programs on HPR-2!Local News:News features and series from HPR's award winning news departmentHPR-2 Program Schedule:find out when all your favorite programs are on the air on HPR-2! Or you can find out more from the HPR-2 detailed program listings.

NOAA: No Need To Panic, The Whales Are Still Coming

Flickr / Bellevue Fine Art Repro
Flickr / Bellevue Fine Art Repro

It seems humpback whales aren’t in any rush to get to the islands. Each winter, more than 10,000 migrate from Alaska to Hawaii’s warmer waters to mate, birth and care for their young. But as HPR’s Molly Solomon reports, the whales are behind schedule.

A couple weeks ago, Ed Lyman got a call about a separated whale calf off Lahaina, Maui. He’s a response coordinator for the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. “We responded, motoring to an offshore of Lahaina,” recalled Lyman. “We saw not a single whale the whole run, and then nothing on the way back.”

That’s pretty unusual for this time of year, when whale season is usually a winter highlight. And it’s not just happening on Maui. Brian Powers is a Kailua Kona aerial photographer on the Big Island. “Normally I start seeing whales the end of November. By the end of December, there are generally plenty of whales all around the place,” said Powers. “This year, I hadn’t seen a single one up until last week. It just seems like they’re just not here yet in any great numbers.”

“We have been getting phone calls from around the world,” said Greg Kaufman, the founder and executive director of the Maui-based Pacific Whale Foundation. “They’re asking what happened to your whales? What went wrong? Where did they all go?”

Last year, 127,000 people booked whale watching tours with the non-profit. Kaufman calls recent media reports misleading, emphasizing that the whales aren’t missing, they’re just a couple weeks late. “I can go out in the peak of the season in February or March and see lean days, when there aren’t a lot of whales out there That doesn’t give you an entire picture of how the season looks,” said Kaufman. “From looking at our data over the last 30 years, what we’re seeing is a pretty normalized pattern of the arrival for humpback whales in Hawai‘i.”

The story, which has made national headlines, prompted a response from Malia Chow, the superintendent of the Hawaiian Islands National Marine Sanctuary. She clarified that local tour operators have started reporting normal numbers of whales in recent days. She also pointed out that we’re still a couple months away from peak whale season, saying “whales don’t have watches or calendars, and they might not exactly follow human expectations.”

Hawai‘i Pacific University marine biology professor Kristi West speculates the whales might just be delayed due warmer water temperatures in the North. “A large number of factors may be contributing to the whales coming a little slower than normal,” said West. “But one thing that really jumps out is the strong El Nino year.”

“There’s a really big change going on as far as our ocean weather,” said Paul Nachtigall, a research professor at UH M?noa’s Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology. He says there could be a number of factors at play, but it’s just too early to know. “Are the humpbacks going to California with new warm waters there? Are the whales fewer here and going other places,” asked Nachtigall. “Or are they just late? So far we have a lot of speculation and a lot of hypotheses but no new answers.”

More answers could surface later this month. The National Marine Sanctuary’s annual whale count starts in late January.

Molly Solomon
Molly Solomon joined HPR in May 2012 as an intern for the morning talk show The Conversation. She has since worn a variety of hats around the station, doing everything from board operator to producer.
Related Stories