Whales lined the boat near Bermagui, about 380 kilometers from Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, while feeding on a large ball of bait, a well-cleaned school of fish in shape. spherical.
Simon Millar, owner of Sapphire Coastal Adventures, was conducting a team training exercise with his staff when they saw the whales on 9 September. In the video you can see whales blowing their tails into the ocean and trying to graze the fish.
Millar said it was only the second time a massive aggregation of whales – known as a “megapod” – had been seen in Australian waters.
“It was amazing,” he told CNN. “We saw whales swimming all over the area. They were everywhere. We were very lucky.
“Sight and sound were really something.”
Its annual migration can cover up to 6,214 miles (10,000 kilometers) and attracts thousands of visitors to coastal cities such as Byron Bay, Hervey Bay and Eden. Most hunchbacks migrate to the South Ocean from September to November, the department said.
Millar said the whales he has seen this year have been fed much more, possibly due to lack of food.
“We are depleting their food source in Antarctica due to overfishing,” he said.
David M. Baker, an associate professor at the Swire Institute of Marine Science at the University of Hong Kong, said humans “compete directly with (whales) for food,” and that we are changing where food is available, “altering the global climate. ”
“Global fisheries deplete the things that whales eat, such as school of fish and krill, and can seriously undermine their recovery,” he said. “Climate change is also affecting the recovery of some species, including critically endangered free whales in the North Atlantic.”