Coastal touring boat operators in Australia received a rare spectacle last week as more than 100 humpback whales landed on a swirling ball of bait fish. Simon Miller, owner of Sapphire Coastal Adventures, and his team saw the massive aggregation or megapod of whales on Thursday off the coast of Bermagui in New South Wales off the south-east coast of Australia.
Sapphire Coastal Adventures / Reuters
“The big smell, the fish everywhere, the whales going through it. Now, the whales outside were wagging their tails, ordering the collection of the bait and then the whales coming up and coming out of everywhere,” Miller said. He told Reuters news agency. “It’s a pretty amazing thing.”
He and his team spotted the whales – and captured their behavior in an impressive drone video – in a piece of water that humpback whales frequent at this time of year as they return to Antarctica from the waters. warmer in the north, where they raise their young.
“Last year, exactly that same week, we had a massive aggregation of humpback whales,” Miller told Reuters. “What this is is where you get a megapod and it’s where you have more than 20 whales at a time feeding on a specific area.”
Sapphire Coastal Adventures / Reuters
But in nearly two decades of waters toward Bermagui, Miller said he had never seen such a large group of marine mammals until last year.
“We’ve seen whales feeding on the south coast maybe, like, 18, 19, since I’ve been doing it, 19. But we’ve never seen them feeding on such huge aggregations,” he said. .