I knew from the blow that it was not a humpback since humpback blows are much taller and as we saw the top part of the body rise out of the water we could see it had a very small rounded dorsal fin and ridges along it's back. Then we saw the top of the head, which was very rounded at the front. I thought it was too small to be sperm whale (in my mind, these are always bigger than humpbacks) but when I looked in one of our guide books I discovered that female sperm whales are half the size of males (males can reach over 60 feet in length). It probably wasn't a juvenile since young whales are usually spotted close to adults and this one was all alone so I'm pretty sure it was an adult female.

She stayed mostly on the surface, only taking shallow dives so we never saw her tail but just before she disappeared behind the ship amongst the waves she raised one of her side flippers in the air as if to wave goodbye.

We had just passed over the continental shelf and were in very deep water, about 300 miles from the nearest land. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a whale. It's amazing how they never get lost. Do they use celestial navigation like the old sailors used to? Do they use the earth's magnetism? Do they use sounds, smells (sensing the contents of the water) and currents? Scientists think they might use all of these tools but nobody really knows for sure. I think it's funny how some people put our own species on some imaginary pedestal above the rest of the animal kingdom but in order to navigate the oceans we need to use an assortment of man-made tools (maps, compasses and funky rulers) and without new advances in technology like radar and satellites we'd find it very difficult to avoid collisions and running aground.

Yet animals like turtles, butterflies, birds and whales don't need anything extra to find their way thousands of miles across oceans and continents. Some species return to exactly the same places each year (accurate even to the same nest or beach). Why do we think we are so clever? We have the ability to completely manipulate any environment but we choose to take advantage of this to the extent that we overexploit every inch of the earth resulting in our own demise and the extinction of hundreds of other species with every year that passes. Are we really highly intelligent animals in the grand scheme of things? Surely the whales and all the creatures of this earth, deserve a lot more respect that we give them.

Sperm whales were once prime targets of the whaling industry yet thankfully remain the most abundant of the large whales though their populations are still recovering. They are most often found in canyon waters, over the edges of banks or continental slopes (where we were when we saw one) but are threatened by collisions with ships and entanglement in fishing gear.

I wonder what we will see next. One thing I keep seeing is creamy white floating round blobs with radially protruding feathery appendages . Nobody has any idea what they are yet there are thousands of these things all around us every day. They might be some kind of floating mollusk but I really have no idea (and that's pretty irritating considering I'm a Zoologist). I will endeavor to catch one and photograph it. However, the sea is quite rough today and I haven't seen any this morning. Perhaps we have left them all behind.

L.