Good Evening Aquanauts,

Today on our 9am expedition we were joined by Captain Bill in our quest for cetacean life in the briny deep of Stellwagen Bank.  We plotted a course for the Northwest Corner, eager to find ocean inhabitants who endured the churning seas of yesterday’s tempest.  Our skillful navigator was able to ferret out a humpback whale partaking in brief dives of 1 to 2 minutes.  This creature revealed a long-awaited fluke pattern while initiating a sounding dive, and we learned this whale’s name to be Scylla!  We eventually grew restless with several subdued surface intervals, and we ended our trip with a southerly search that unveiled one large finback whale.

Our crew returned the Northwest Corner for our 2pm adventure, hoping to find Scylla spry and refreshed.  Instead we stumbled into a finback and minke whale traveling in close proximity to one another.  They vanished and left us feeling vanquished, but several minutes later we spotted two black peaks moving through the surface.  The first fin was moving with linear intent, followed by a second fin moving in a wide serpentine arc along the same axis.  This movement was uncharacteristic of whales, suggesting the presence of an animal completely non-mammalian!

This enigma was a basking shark, known in latin as Cetorhinus maximus!  These misunderstood nomads average 22-29’ in length, with the largest measuring 40.3’ in the Bay of Fundy.  They sieve for planktonic organisms with bristled appendages called gill rakers, located deep in the throat on the inside of the gills.  Basking sharks may shed these feeding mechanisms during the winter months whilst travelling deep in the ocean, and scientists speculate that they either change their diet to benthic animals of the ocean floor, or utilize their slow metabolism in a form of hibernation!

This unexpected encounter with an Atlantic apparition ended when the fish made an abrupt dive for deeper water, but passengers seemed pleased to learn of one of the few “filter-feeding” sharks on our planet.  We departed further south in a search that bore no fruit, or whale!  Rainchecks were deemed appropriate, given the brevity of our cetacean sightings.

I aspire for further encounters with the Basking Shark, and hope to share further stories of awe and admiration of our unusual oceans!

Peace and Love,

Rich

Black-crowned Night-Heron. Rich Dolan, BHC naturalist

Scylla's blow. Rich Dolan, BHC naturalist

Scylla's fluke pattern. Rich Dolan, BHC naturalist

Basking shark swim pattern. Rich Dolan, BHC naturalist

Basking shark with agape maw. Rich Dolan, BHC naturalist

Large gills and dorsal fin of Basking Shark. Rich Dolan, BHC naturalist