Blue Planet II by James Honeyborne & Mark Brownlow

Author:James Honeyborne & Mark Brownlow [Honeyborne, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781473530072
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2017-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Humpbacks to the Rescue!

In Monterey Bay, a colony of California sea lions is on the move. They are going hunting. An adult needs to eat 5–6 per cent of its body weight each day to stay healthy, and a growing juvenile needs even more. They hunt a wide variety of fish, octopus, squid, and shrimp, especially mackerel and pollock, and target shoaling fish that are seasonally abundant, such as Pacific herring and salmon, and they know where to find them. They ‘porpoise’ across the sea’s surface, usually travelling no more than a few tens of kilometres between summer rookeries and feeding grounds, although sea lions have been known to venture as far as 900 kilometres on a single hunting trip. They search the horizon all the while for the tell-tale signs of a potential feast. They watch for whales.

Humpback whales travel all the way from Hawaii or Baja California for this time of plenty. The spring and summer phytoplankton blooms ensure the food chain is stocked, especially with the silvery hordes of oil-rich herring. By day the shoals dive deeper, but the whales force them to the surface. This is what the sea lions have been looking for. They gather in rafts of twenty or thirty, in amongst the feeding whales, and when their gigantic neighbours lunge up through the surface, with their mouths agape and fish spilling out, the sea lions whirl in to pick off any that try to escape.

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