–by Alma
Lots of people think that the ocean is empty except for little goldfish. We haven’t seen any of those, but we have been seeing many other types of sea creatures. Before we left, I was thinking a lot about the places we’d go, and I didn’t think as much about the wildlife we’d see. But there’s a lot of it! On 3/4/18, my half birthday, we anchored at Isla Isabel-Mexico’s Galapagos–so it seemed like an awesome time to write about sea creatures!
We have seen lots of sea mammals, which can be broken up into cetaceans and pinnipeds. Cetaceans are animals like whales and dolphins. Pinnipeds are things like seals, sea lions, and elephant seals. We have seen all of those. We have seen lots of seals and sea lions the whole way, but we only saw elephant seals at San Miguel in the Channel Islands. The beach was covered in them. The males have big inflatable noses and weigh a maximum of 4,500 pounds! We have also seen lots of dolphins.
At one point, we saw them playing under the bow (front) of the boat! There were about a dozen of them for about ten minutes! In Bahia Magdalena, we saw a mother and baby gray whale swimming together. While we were sailing, we saw a humpback whale breech six times, and then a different humpback whale breech nine times. More recently, we saw humpback whales “lobster tailing” or hitting the water with their tails. You could hear a thud a few seconds after because of the distance.
We have also seen turtles. The first day, we just saw one. Then a few days later, we saw a bunch–everywhere you looked. They looked like floating rocks. They were funny. They just sat there paddling every so often. We’ve continued to see sea turtles all along the coast of Mexico.
The thing that we have seen most variety in is sea birds. I will have a list of all of them all later. My favorites were the frigate birds with long forked tails. The males can inflate a big red balloon under their beaks. When they tap their beaks against this “balloon” it makes a vibrating drum sound. We also saw the fluffy frigate bird chicks!
Another thing that we have seen is animals in tide pools, from sea anemones that curl up when you touch them, to crabs, to clams that you dig up with your toes.
We have also seen lots of other miscellaneous sea creatures, like flying fish (one landed on our deck) and rays that jump and splash the surface. Also, we saw little jellyfish that don’t sting and a huge sunfish. Four squids landed on our deck as well! At night, we see bio-luminescent zooplankton. Bio-luminescent zooplankton are microscopic organisms that glow when the water is churned up.
As you can see, the ocean is definitely not empty! It is full of life, and we are seeing so much! Though definitely not all of it.
Birds We’ve Seen:
- Frigate birds
- Tropic birds
- Turns
- Pelicans
- Cormorants
- Guillemots
- Shear waters
- Osprey
- Brown Boobies
- Great blue herons
- Egrets