A WHALE OF A PHOTO
Guide shoots as sea lion briefly swept into humpback’s mouth
Chase Dekker gripped his camera with anticipation. A couple hundred feet from his seat on a whale-watching boat, the waters of Monterey Bay in California teemed with activity. A group of California sea lions had just come up for air after feeding on a school of anchovies and following close behind them was the main event: humpback whales.
But as a whale burst from the waves, the wildlife photographer told said, he instantly noticed something was off. A sizable sea lion, weighing 400 to 600 pounds, was teetering precariously above the whale’s gaping mouth.
“I was like, ‘Oh my goodness,’ ” the 27-yearold said, “and I lifted my camera.”
Dekker, who was guiding the July 22 tour, didn’t know it then, but he ended up capturing an occurrence so unusual that many marine mammal researchers had never seen it before. The photo shows the surprised-looking sea lion, its mouth wide open, appearing moments away from being engulfed by the roughly 50-foot-long surfacing humpback whale.
“It was capturing this perfect moment when nature kind of backfires a little bit,” said Ari Friedlaender, an ecologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz who studies the foraging behavior of marine mammals. “It’s so anomalous to see something like this because the animals are so well-adapted and so good at what they do.”
The unlucky sea lion was likely just in “the wrong place at the wrong time,” Friedlaender said.
“This was a once-in-a-million time that the sea lion zigged when it should have zagged
and kind of got taken for a ride,” he said, noting that there was “no intent by the whale to eat the sea lion.”
When the Sanctuary Cruises tour set out last week, Dekker said, he knew chances were good of seeing enormous humpback whales, sea lions and sea birds engaged in “feeding frenzies.” Between late spring and fall, ravenous whales, along with other predators, are often drawn to the bay by the masses of schooling fish.
Though the group of animals that Dekker’s tour came across was on the smaller side with only three humpback whales and about 200 sea lions, activity was abundant at the water’s surface, he said. As the boat pulled up to the action, Dekker grabbed his camera.
“I always have it ready for any lunge feed,” he said, referencing an eating technique used by humpbacks and other baleen whales in which they rapidly move toward their prey, jaws agape, and take in mouthfuls of food. They later use flexible structures in their mouths to filter out the water, leaving behind small fish and krill or plankton.
First, Dekker saw the sea lions pop up. After years of observing whales, he knew that meant the massive creatures were about “10 to 30 seconds” behind, so he got into position.
But unlike the countless other times he’s watched a lunge-feeding whale surface, this time one sea lion couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. Dekker said he reflexively snapped a few shots but was so excited he initially didn’t even bother checking his camera.
“I just ran around the boat going, ‘Did everyone see that?’ ” he said. “I was screaming at the other boats that I know next to us.”
A short while later, Dekker returned to the camera and clicked through the images to find, much to his surprise, that he had somehow managed to capture the fleeting moment.
“I was just ecstatic,” he said. “I had actually taken it, gotten it.”
This isn’t the first time animals other than fish and krill have had the misfortune of accidentally ending up in the mouth of a humpback whale. Researchers have found evidence of small seabirds getting swallowed, while larger creatures such as pelicans and harbor seals have had close encounters. In March, a Bryde’s whale, part of the same group as humpback whales, even reportedly scooped up a dive tour operator in South Africa before spitting him back out.
The fate of the sea lion captured in this photo isn’t clear, but Dekker said he’s “almost 100 percent confident” that it escaped unharmed.
A humpback whale’s esophagus is “only about the size of maybe a big grapefruit or small melon,” he said, meaning the chances of a sea lion that weighs hundreds of pounds getting swallowed and eaten are slim.
He added that an injured or dead sea lion wasn’t spotted in the water and the whale seemed to be behaving normally a few minutes later, which would not be the case if it still had the mammal in its mouth.
“If you had the equivalent of a little field mouse inside your mouth, you’d probably be a little concerned,” he said. “You would notice.”
The sea lion likely just swam away and continued feeding, Dekker said.
For Dekker, the picture represents “a true once-in-a-lifetime moment” that he was able to “immortalize so everyone can see it forever.”
“It’s something I may never witness and most likely will never capture ever again,” he said.