Rare mother Bryde’s whale and calf spotted off Southern California coast

Capt. Craig DeWitt, aboard the Manute’a whale-watching vessel, got a tip Tuesday afternoon, July 23 that a mother and calf whale pair were heading south from Laguna Beach to Dana Point.

Initially, he was told to be on the lookout for a pair of fin whales. But when the calf swam over to his boat, DeWitt recognized the curious animal wasn’t a fin whale but a rarely seen Bryde’s whale.

The tropical species is native to areas such as the Gulf of California. Some reports indicate the population on the West Coast has been as low as 13, DeWitt said.

The animals were swimming side-by-side when the calf headed toward the boat. “He was there just looking at people,” DeWitt said.

DeWitt looked through the zoom on his camera and recognized the whale’s under jaw was black.

“Fin whales always have a white lower jaw,” he said. “That was the first thing that made us consider what other whale this could be.”

Then he got the clue he needed: three ridges near the blowhole.

“Fin, blue and minke all have just one ridge,” he said.

Marine biologist Alisa Schulman-Janiger, who for nearly four decades has run the American Cetacean Society’s Los Angeles Chapter Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project at Point Vicente, said she has seen only a handful of cow/calf Bryde’s whale pairs over the years. Likely, she said, they are here because the water temperature has warmed and they are hunting for schooling fish.

Bryde’s whales are baleen whales, meaning they can scoop up thousands of gallons of fish and water and use the baleen to filter their catch. Their head makes up a quarter of their sleek body and their flippers are slender and pointed.