Aria, a young humpback whale who was feared dead after her celebrity mother, Fran, was killed by a ship last August, has been spotted swimming in Monterey Bay – hale, hearty and hungry.
After surviving the catastrophic accident and then a long journey to Mexico as an orphan, the 1½-year-old whale has returned with a group of others to feed in the rich waters of Monterey Bay, where she was identified by whale-watchers last Sunday.
“It was one of those days that truly felt miraculous,” said marine biologist Dane McDermott, who was part of the whale-watching expedition that saw Aria leap out of the water in a breach, then dive.
The youngster’s arrival has raised the spirits of whale enthusiasts at a time of peril for the world’s largest creatures. Her mother, Fran, was the most photographed whale in California, thrilling onlookers with a bold curiosity and unique tail pattern.
Fran was a young mother, and had lost her first calf. Aria was her second born, named by conservationist Aeon Bashir “to symbolize her life as a beautiful melody.”
But Fran became a symbol of the dangers of maritime traffic, suffering blunt force trauma last August in a collision with a ship, according to a necropsy performed by Sausalito’s Marine Mammal Center.
Her pungent 50-foot-long carcass washed ashore at Half Moon Bay’s Manhattan Beach, bloating like a balloon and then deflating. Fran’s demise was an untimely end to a life that could have lasted decades longer. She died at age 17; humpbacks live, on average, 45 or 50 years.
“She was roadkill,” said naturalist Ted Cheeseman, whose massive database of whale photos includes 277 photos of Fran. A sunset memorial service was held in her honor, where saddened whale enthusiasts gathered at the ocean’s edge, offering tributes, art, incense burning and ceremonial Ohlone tribal songs and drumming.
Since then, ship collisions have been blamed for the deaths of two other whales whose bodies washed up on Bay Area beaches. On March 25, a male gray whale was found on Bolinas Beach in Bolinas. On April 7, a juvenile male gray whale washed ashore near San Leandro Marina. The true death toll is likely to be much higher, say experts, as whale carcasses often sink to the sea floor.
Alone, Aria was left to fend for herself.
She was only nine months old at the time of her mother’s death, and her future looked grim, said Cheeseman. She was no longer actively nursing, but whale calves typically stay with their mothers a year.
“In my heart, I figured that the calf was probably killed at the same time, or had since died,” he said.
Aria apparently escaped the boat strike but probably witnessed Fran’s death, because calves cling close to their mothers, he said.
Then she made the long 1,500-mile journey down to Mexican winter grounds as an orphan, likely joining other humpbacks for company. On the route, she would have been guided by both instinct and the need to socialize.
“It was very unclear whether or not she was going to learn that route successfully. It was very unclear whether she had enough time with her mom to kind of learn important skills,” McDermott said. She must have relied on caloric reserves to get herself through those first tough weeks, he said. “And she may have just been super smart — a precocious calf — that picked everything up.”
Now she’s an adolescent, measuring about 30 to 35 feet long and weighing about 12 to 15 tons based on an image analysis by Martin van Aswegen, a PhD student with the Marine Mammal Research Program at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, who studies whale maturation.
On Sunday morning, the catamaran vessel Blackfin, owned by Monterey Bay Whale Watch, set out to find killer whales, not humpbacks. The weather was sunny and breezy, and passengers gazed out at Pajaro Dunes, agricultural fields and blue ocean waters.
With no killer whales in sight, the boat changed course, opting to go visit a group of 10 to 15 humpbacks, including two youngsters, swimming in 2,000-foot deep waters about two miles off the coast of Moss Landing.
One of the smaller whales breached, thrilling the crowd. The boat tracked the young whale as it fed, and research naturalist Mella Re-Sugiura snapped some photos.
To learn its identity, the crew quickly sent a photograph to Cheeseman. His image recognition AI database — which holds photos of 30,000 whales in the North Pacific and another 50,000 whales in other oceans — compared it to a photo of Aria taken last summer, when she was still with her mother.
It was a match. The youngster’s tail, called a fluke, showed barnacle scars that are located at the precise location as Aria’s. The fluke was also distinctly black in the center, turning quickly to white. Aria’s identity has since been confirmed by another photo taken by Kate Cummings of Blue Ocean Whale Watch.
“I lost my breath,” said McDermott. “She learned how to be a whale in a pretty short amount of time.”
The news spread fast, as Cheeseman called everyone who had mourned Fran’s loss and feared for her calf’s survival.
“Last time,” relaying Fran’s death, “it was a tragedy,” he said. “Now it’s a triumph.”