Whale watchers and would-be whale watchers all over the country will have been inspired and excited by the news of the sighting of a blue whale in Irish waters a couple of weeks ago. The initial observation—the first recorded and confirmed sighting of a blue whale in Irish waters for at least 20 years—was made during a tuna fishing trip off the coast of Kerry, and there were two further sightings in the following few days.
The blue whale is the biggest animal in the world, and possibly the biggest animal that has ever lived on this planet. A fully grown adult measures up to 33 metres long—that’s the equivalent of 11 Minis parked end to end—and weighs in at well over 100 tons, or more than two fully grown African elephants. They can swim at up to 30 miles an hour, though their cruising speed is more likely to be around 12 mph, and feed on krill (tiny shrimp ), which they consume in huge amounts—up to four tons each a day—during the summer feeding season. Blue whales were almost wiped out by hunting during the early part of the twentieth century. They were named a protected species in the 1960s, and it’s estimated that there are only 4,000 blue whales at most in the whole of the northern hemisphere, which makes the sightings this month all the more special.
A whale of a time
Whales occupy a unique place in the popular imagination, and they appear regularly in literature, film and television, from Jonah and the whale to Moby-Dick, from Gulliver’s Travels to Flipper and Free Willy. And in the 1980s, no student flat was complete without a record (vinyl, of course ) of whale music. The idea that these animals can communicate over miles – hundreds of miles, in some cases— is in itself awe-inspiring, perhaps even more astonishing than the actual clicks, booms, grunts and whistles that make up their conversations. Many whales use echolocation— a sort of auditory global positioning system – to track schools of fish. This is essentially the same method that bats use to avoid obstacles when they’re in flight. The whale emits a series of clicks as it dives and can determine the location of the fish by the echoes that bounce back off them.
The economic significance of whales, particularly in north America, where they were hunted for meat and oil for hundreds of years, made them an iconic symbol of the riches of the ocean. The sheer size of the animals, their grace and power, are almost impossible to comprehend, and it’s not hard to imagine the mixture of terror, awe and adrenaline-fuelled exhilaration that must have filled the hearts of early whale hunters when they saw the fluke of a big whale break the surface of the apparently limitless ocean.
A surprising number of species of cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises ) visit Irish waters. Eleven species are regularly observed off British and Irish shores, from the small harbour porpoise, which can be seen in small groups in inshore waters, to the fin whale and humpback whale, which pass the west coast during their annual migration, but seldom venture close to shore. Bottlenose dolphins and Risso’s dolphins are regularly spotted off the coast of Mayo, from Broadhaven Bay to Clew Bay to Achill Island: during the month of August alone there were five recorded sightings of groups of dolphins off the Mayo coast.
The Irish Whale and Dolphin Group, which is “dedicated to the conservation and better understanding of cetaceans ... in Irish waters” is a good source of information, and their website (www.iwdg.ie ) is well worth a visit.
