Roger Payne 



Old-time whalers referred to the callosities on the right whale's snout 

 as the "bonnet," below. The unique patterns of these callosities 

 identify individual whales. Right: Usually most of the individuals in a 

 mating group, like the one here, are males in pursuit of a single 

 female that is the center of attention. 



any orca tried to get at the calves in the 

 middle of the ring, it would probably have 

 been killed outright. 



Females with calves appear to form the 

 center of the herd in our comer of the bay, 

 but over the years — through observations 

 from the cliffs, boats, and the air — we 

 have been able to piece together other in- 

 formation about the herd's overall struc- 

 ture and movements. Joining the primary 

 mother-calf unit are subaduh males and 

 females, whose mothers have given birth 

 to new calves. After a few years of travel- 

 ing with this group, however, young males 

 disappear, perhaps going off to live with 

 other males, while the females remain 

 with the group until the year they give 

 birth to their first calf, when they are be- 

 tween five and nine years of age. We don't 

 know where the females go between calv- 

 ing years; we only know that they subse- 

 quently reappear every three years on av- 

 erage with a new calf. 



Covering up to twelve miles in a day, 

 the herd doesn't take up a station at just 

 any point along the shore, but moves back 

 and forth along a fixed and relatively small 

 stretch of the coastUne. Once estabhshed, 

 the beat remains the same for years, usu- 

 ally between headlands projecting out 

 from the general contour of the coast. This 



behavior makes sense given the underly- 

 ing acoustics, as points of land cast under- 

 water acoustic shadows, and we suspect 

 that right whales use sound as a means of 

 staying together in herds. 



Along the most extensive sandy 

 beaches of the peninsula, the mothers 

 stretch out across the water each day like 

 beads on a chain. Look at them in the 

 morning, and the whole group appears sta- 

 tionary, a mother every half-mile or so. 

 Look again at lunch time, and sometimes 

 the entire herd has moved as much as six 

 miles, but their spacing is still more or less 

 intact. Females appear to help themselves 

 to the best areas — a long beach, protected 

 from the full force of wind and storm 

 waves, with a gently sloping sand bot- 

 tom — and to push everyone else out, 

 which is just what seems to happen. 



We have learned to identify individuals 

 by callosities — patches of thickened skin 

 distributed on the top, front, and sides of a 

 whale's head — which make a whale rec- 

 ognizable from all directions except from 

 below. Callosities tend to be more devel- 

 oped in males than females, and males 

 seem to use their callosities for fighting, 

 the way bulls use their homs — only not for 

 gouging but for scraping opponents. 

 Thousands of external parasites, called 



cyamids, or whale hce, cover the naturally 

 gray callous tissue so thoroughly they 

 make it look white. As the cyamids feed 

 on the thickened, dead skin of the callosi- 

 ties, they sculpt the tissue into distinctive 

 forms. Another way to identify individual 

 whales is by their distinctive white belly 

 markings, ff we are diving in murky water, 

 these bright white markings look almost 

 luminous and are clearly visible long be- 

 fore the rest of the whale looms into view. 

 Callosities and belly patches probably also 

 enable the whales to identify and recog- 

 nize one another. 



Although the whales of Peninsula 

 Valdes appear to be active day and night, 

 mornings are their favored time for sleep- 

 ing, and when the morning is especially 

 calm and sunny, they are scattered 

 throughout the bay like drifting logs, with 

 the sounds of their snores filling the air. 

 When their nostrils don't open and close 

 cleanly, the snores sound like deep growls, 



44 Natural History 1/94 



