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Today after some early mid-water trawls we resumed the visual transect lines around Sturge Island. Compared to the northern islands the number of whale sightings was very low. This matched nicely with the echosounder data that showed very few krill or fish aggregations.
After finishing the transects at Sturge the ship headed north toward the southern tip of Buckle Island. During the crossing the acoustic team reported hearing the quiet ‘D’ calls of Antarctic blues whales...and soon after the observers called down to the bridge the sighting of tall, columnar blows from two very large baleen whales.
Despite this opportunity coming as somewhat of a surprise all went smoothly. The whales team quickly adopted their pre-assigned roles to visually and acoustically track the whales, to guide the ship, to record photo-identification data and to take small biopsy samples. On breaking from the pod we had successfully taken valuable photographs of these two rare Antarctic blue whales and also come within about 30cm of collecting a skin sample - sadly the biopsy dart fell a fraction short. From the photographs we can identify individual whales from the mottled pattern on their flanks and ultimately these data be used to estimate the population size and the movement of these whales around Antarctica.
Currently we are near Sabrina Island. This island is dwarfed by its massive neighbour Buckle but is a specially protected area in Antarctica because of its unique mixed species colony of gentoo and chinstrap penguins. We can just pick out the penguins high above the steep cliffs and rocky slopes – it must be tough climb for little legs!
The plan is to run more echosounder transects overnight and resume visually transects at sunrise.
Map
A map showing Australia and Antarctica. The map shows the journey of one voyage that has occured in the season, with each route highlighted in a distinct colour.