Courtship and Mating Groups Among Southern Right Whales

Courting groups of whales are spectacular.  I have seen many humpback courting groups (aka, active groups, or heat runs, although the latter is misleading) in Hawaii and, at one time in my life, was tasked with getting in the water to determine who the focal animals were (female and male) along with challenging and peripheral animals.  It was rewarding work and some of the most exciting animal behavior I will probably ever see. I have watched a courting group of blue whales from a plane far offshore of San Diego.  And I have twice travelled to Argentina’s Peninsula Valdes which led to a few encounters with courting and mating groups of southern right whales (Eubalaena australis).  The activities of these groups are extremely difficult to capture photographically, except from a drone, and so far I have little to show for my efforts.  Photographing a mother and calf is, if I may be blunt, child’s play compared to photographing a mating pair or large courting group of whales, which is why most of the nice images one sees of southern right whales are of calves.  For those courting groups that I have seen, if we were in shallow water (which is where we would often work to see mothers and calves) the courting group tended to stir up the sand within a few minutes of starting their activities and the risk of being run over by twisting and turning whales in near-zero visibility was high.  I once found myself underneath a pair of whales who cared little about me with about 5′ of space between the bottom whale and the sand, and from that time have been even more cautious than usual around courting groups.   In deeper water the visibility is less of an issue, but still the whales move so erratically that knowing where to place oneself in anticipation of a mating photograph is more of a throw of the dice than anything else.  I’ll return and try again and see if I can do better, but I have a few images so far.

Note that in one of the drone images a calf is seen alongside its mother with several males flanking the female. This is common. Males will approach a female whales with the intent of mating even if the female is a mother with a calf.  From what I have observed, the calf simply needs to hang on for the ride and stay close enough to its mother that they can rejoin if they become separated in the jostling.

Note that in the above two images, one whale is above the other and the whale on the bottom is inverted.  This inverted position allows the whales to be belly-to-belly.  In my experience it is the male that is below, but I don’t have any reason to believe the female could be on the bottom at times — I just have not seen it.

In the second image above, the mating pair is on the left and two other mature whales are alongside and observed (one near the bottom of the frame, and a light gray whales in the right of the frame).  Is the belly-to-belly pair of whales mating?  It is impossible to prove without a photo of penetration but in the circumstances I have been in its dangerous to get that as the visibility is poor, the whales are moving fast and erratically, and there are other whales alongside meaning the photographer stands a good chance of being smushed between huge animals that are not paying attention to the puny man-fish.   Nevertheless, while I believe they are mating in these two images. I will have to keep trying in the future to get the proof shot.

The image above shows a well-known large male, one who is often seen in courting and mating groups as a central player.  He was once a white calf (about 3-5% of calves are white, but darken to gray or light black as they age) but for some reason he is an exception: he never really darkened fully and, when seen in good light as with a drone, is clearly very light gray or still nearly white.  El Copulador (“The Copulator”) is the tongue-in-check name bestowed on him by friend and top underwater photographer Adriana Basques, who has spent many seasons in Peninsula Valdes and has seen this male a number of times.  We saw El Copulador underwater in a short-lived courtship group a few days earlier but the water was too poor for me to make any good images.  Whether a calf will be white is a recessive genetic trait, meaning it must be passed to the calf by both parents.  In E.C.’s case, he would presumably pass the white gene on to 50% of the calves he sires and among those it would then just be question of whether the mother also passed the white gene to the calf.  The longer E.C. lives and the more success he has as a player, the more white calves we might expect to see in the future!  Below are a few more courting group images that I was fairly happy with.  Cheers, and thanks for looking!