CASE OF THE BLUES

There isn’t a fish bowl nearly big enough to hold an 80-foot blue whale, or a 45-foot gray or a 40-foot humpback.

But Mother Nature has taken care of this, gathering up these spectacular cetaceans, along with many others, as if to put them on display in small areas of the Santa Barbara Channel near Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa islands.

And the spectacle is leaving even the most seasoned whale watchers in awe.

Bernardo Alps, president of the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Cetacean Society, called his trip last week aboard the Santa Barbara-based Condor “totally unbelievable.”

The first sighting, while en route to the islands, was a lone humpback. The next, Alps wrote in this month’s ACS newsletter, was “a large herd of common dolphins that seemed to be heading toward some food source with great determination; they didn’t even want to ride the bow of the Condor.”

Next was a pod of Risso’s dolphins, swimming with a small number of northern right whales, both being “more than happy to bow ride with us.”

Then came the primary reason for the journey: blue whales, at up to 150 tons the largest animals ever to grace our planet. Alps counted 20 of them as they lunged through the surface with their mouths agape, “sometimes on their sides, sometimes on their backs with their lower jaws towering like big tents,” gorging on planktonic krill.

“Sometimes they came up so close to the boat,” Alps continued, “that we could see the krill jump above the surface in futile escape attempts just before being swallowed.”

The krill, shrimp-like animals measuring half to three-quarters of an inch, are the reason for all the activity, currently centered closer to Santa Rosa Island about 25 miles offshore.

Blue whale sightings in this area are nothing new. In fact, their presence in recent years has become common during summer months, an indication that the majestic mammals have found conditions here to their liking.

But this summer, the ocean has remained unseasonably cold and especially nutrient-rich, perhaps because of the La Nina phenomenon. Krill has been thicker, turning large patches of ocean into a dark red bisque, which has all sorts of creatures living high on the hog, particularly blue whales, which consume up to four tons of krill a day.

John Calambokidis, senior research biologist at Cascadia Research Cooperative in Olympia, Wash., is photo-cataloging blue whales in an attempt to learn more about their migration patterns.

He identified 52 in one day during a recent voyage into the Santa Barbara Channel, and estimates that there are at least 100 in the area.

“It’s about as high a density of blues as I’ve seen at one time,” Calambokidis said. “We had 25 within a one-square-mile area, where there were bands of krill extending downward 50-150 meters.”

Nearly 2,500 blue whales are believed to summer off California, most of them well offshore, which is remarkable in that this represents one-quarter of the worldwide population.

“Which tells us they’re doing well here,” Calambokidis said.

Along with the blue whales, but more scattered, are a few dozen humpbacks. Minke whales and at least one fin whale also have been sighted.

But what’s really unusual about this season is that there are also some gray whales, which have taken a break from their 6,000-mile journey home from Baja California to fill up on krill.

Grays are basically bottom feeders who dig up tiny crustaceans called amphipods. They do most of their feeding in and beyond the Bering Sea during the summer and fall before their migration to Baja’s warm lagoons, where they spend the winter mating and nursing before heading home in the spring.

They typically do not eat krill. But this is an atypical year for grays. More than 50 have perished and washed ashore during the voyage home and experts believe it’s because they lacked the sustenance to complete their 12,000-mile round-trip journey.

There are two predominant theories for this: Either gray whales, which are protected by federal law, have exceeded their carrying capacity--there are an estimated 26,600 California gray whales, compared to 20,000 in the days before whaling ships hunted them--or those dying are victims of a decline in productivity in the Bering Sea, perhaps because of unusual climatic conditions caused by El Nino.

In any event, a small number of them have joined the cast of aquatic characters performing off Santa Barbara.

“We’ve even seen blue sharks feeding with the whales, which is really funny to watch because they don’t have baleen [the thin plates hanging from the upper jaw that some whales use to strain food from the water] and they’re in there snapping their jaws like they’re eating popcorn,” said Fred Benko, skipper of the Condor, which runs out of Sea Landing in Santa Barbara Harbor.

Surprisingly, the presence of mammals that are twice as long and three times as massive as gray whales--a blue whale’s tongue can weigh six tons--has not generated nearly the interest grays do among the whale-watching public.

But then these whales are a lot farther offshore and accessible only from Santa Barbara and, to a lesser extent, Ventura.

The Condor, which runs daily trips costing $65 per person, has an advantage over Ventura’s Island Packers in that Sea Landing offers a much more direct route to the main concentration of blues, and the boat ride is two hours instead of three or more.

Many of Benko’s passengers are marine biology students and conservation groups, or ACS members such as Alps, who has fund-raising trips scheduled July 31 and Aug. 7. [Those interested can call (310) 399-5367 for details.]

But if the general public has been slow to respond to this phenomenon, the scientific community certainly has not.

“The BBC has been out here with helicopters for its new ‘Blue Planet’ series, and National Geographic is coming,” Benko said.

Calambokidis has been there once and is coming again. Bruce Mate, professor of fisheries and wildlife at Oregon State University, has been once this year and is coming again for a month, this time with 11 satellite tags he hopes to attach to 11 overgrown Guinea pigs.

Mate is pioneering research using satellites to track whales and is working on a long-term project to help identify migration patterns and critical habitat, and to study diving patterns and other data.

“We know these particular blue whales are off California in July and August,” he said. “And we know they’re off Baja in October. That’s their last known jumping-off point, although we know some end up off Costa Rica, about 700 miles west in an area called the Costa Rican Dome, which we think is where they go to calve and breed.”

Asked why this kind of technology has not been extensively used before, he replied, “Well, for one thing these tags cost $4,000 each and last only a few months.”

The public can help finance this research, Mate added, by adopting a blue or humpback whale--for projects in Hawaii and the Antarctic--for $5,000 by calling (503) 725-5761. That buys the tag, a name for the whale and regular updates on the whereabouts of the animal and on information garnered through the research.

But if you’ve merely got a case of the blues, a trip into the channel might be the perfect cure.

“They’re all grouped up out there,” Benko said. “All we do is slide up to a krill patch and just stop and sit there, and pretty soon we’re surrounded by whales.”