From the water, Fitz Hugh Sound was foreign to Felicia Vachon. The humpbacks seemed to know it intimately.
Felicia, research coordinator with the Marine Education and Research Society (MERS), has spent most of her time with humpbacks around northeastern Vancouver Island. But during five days travelling the Central Coast this August, she watched animals behaving differently from the whales she knew farther south.
They disappeared on long, deep dives. Some rested quietly just beneath the surface during the day, their blows so faint they were difficult to see even in good conditions. Others gathered in large social groups. Near the mouth of Kwakshua Channel, Felicia and her colleagues watched about eight humpbacks socializing together, with another group of five nearby. In her work around northeastern Vancouver Island, Felicia had never seen such large groups socializing in daytime.
Over five days, the team documented 78 individual humpbacks, four of them first-year-calves, from Cape Caution to the mouth of Burke Channel, including nearshore on the west coast of Calvert Island. Fifty-eight of those, three of them calves, were encountered in Fitz Hugh Sound alone.
“It was almost impossible not to see a blow while we were on the water,” Felicia says.
Fitz Hugh has long been a data-deficient stretch of coast for humpback science, wedged between the range MERS regularly documents around northeastern Vancouver Island and the territory covered by colleagues at the North Coast Cetacean Society farther north. This August’s survey, one leg of MERS’s longer-running work on the Central Coast, was a chance to close part of that gap. What it found fits a larger pattern now emerging coastwide. A study MERS and partner organizations are wrapping up through the Canadian Pacific Humpback Collaboration is showing evidence that individual whales return to particular parts of the British Columbia coast year after year.
Each year, they migrate thousands of kilometres between feeding grounds in British Columbia and breeding areas in Hawaii, Mexico or Central America. Yet when they return north to feed, many appear remarkably faithful to particular stretches of coast.
For Jackie Hildering, education and communications director and co-founder of MERS, the logic is straightforward. After months away from their feeding grounds, humpbacks need to put on weight quickly. A whale that already knows where currents concentrate prey, how the bottom is shaped and which feeding strategies work in a particular place has an advantage over one starting from scratch. Or, as she puts it, if you need to get fat fast, you don’t waste time looking for a new restaurant.
A local way of being a whale
Fitz Hugh Sound is deep, and many of its humpbacks were making long dives. The team also watched whales bubble-net feeding close to shore, releasing curtains of bubbles underwater to concentrate small schooling fish before rising through them. Elsewhere they found bright pink whale feces at the surface, evidence that at least some of the animals had been eating krill.
Exactly what is happening beneath the surface isn’t yet clear. Five days provide a snapshot, not a complete picture. Jackie and Felicia can’t yet say whether some whales specialize in krill while others pursue schooling fish, whether individuals switch between the two, or how feeding changes through the seasons.
Humpbacks can learn feeding techniques from one another. In 2011, Jackie was on the water with photographer Tavish Campbell when a humpback named Conger did something unexpected: instead of lunging through a dense school of juvenile herring, he hung nearly motionless with his mouth open. The fish, held near the surface by common murres and rhinoceros auklets hunting from below, swam in. Conger closed his mouth.
MERS studied the feeding strategy and gave it a name: trap-feeding. More than 40 humpbacks are now known to use it, in waters from the Salish Sea to Haida Gwaii and Alaska. Group bubble-net feeding is also a learned behaviour.
Individual whales return to places they know, while their feeding techniques are shaped by the environment and prey they encounter there. They can also pick up successful strategies from other whales working the same waters.
“You get those little pockets of subculture along British Columbia,” Felicia says. Even after crossing an ocean, whales return to particular places where they know, as she puts it, “how to eat and how to feed.”
Fitz Hugh may be one of those places. Site fidelity is not necessarily permanent, however, and individual whales can change where they spend their time along the coast. Whatever this summer’s survey found is a snapshot, not a guarantee.
Calvert comes back
Among the whales Jackie and Felicia encountered was BCZ0006, known as Calvert.
His identification number gives some indication of how long people have been watching humpbacks on this coast: Calvert was the sixth whale with a mostly white tail entered in the British Columbia catalogue. His name comes from the markings on his fluke, which Christie McMillan and Erin Foster, who were documenting humpbacks for Hakai at the time, thought resembled the shape of Calvert Island. Data from Fisheries and Oceans Canada place Calvert in Fitz Hugh Sound as far back as 1998, with additional sightings in 2002 and 2003. This summer, there he was again.
Calvert wasn’t alone in being recognizable. Whiskers, BCZ0200, appeared on four of the survey’s five days. Her fluke carries a marking that resembles a cat’s face, and she looked so large this summer that Jackie and Felicia wondered whether she might be pregnant.
Another whale, Prop Scar, BCX0321, carries the marks of an earlier encounter with a boat: propeller scars down her side and a line consistent with a vessel’s skeg. This summer she had a calf beside her.
Beginning in 2014, Christie and Erin documented humpbacks around Calvert Island and Fitz Hugh Sound, which Christie remembers as a gap in what was then known about humpbacks along the coast. They wanted to know which whales were using the area and whether the same individuals returned between seasons and from one year to the next.
They soon began recognizing individuals. Some whales appeared winter after winter but not during summer, Christie recalls, while others returned in summer and disappeared in winter. The photographs gradually became a record of individual animals using the same stretch of coast at particular times of year.
More than a decade later, some of the same flukes are still turning up. Seven whales identified in the 2015 catalogue were encountered again during the 2026 survey: Prop Scar, Calvert, Christmastree Lights, Sorbet, Marble, White Lightning and Big Dipper. Two of them, Prop Scar and Marble, were seen this summer with calves.
Christie knows some of those flukes well enough that the recognition has outlasted her time working regularly in Fitz Hugh. A couple of years ago, nearly a decade after leaving the area, she caught a distant glimpse of a mostly white fluke while on the water with Jackie.
“I know that whale,” she remembers telling her. “It’s BCZ6.”
It was Calvert.
To Christie, the whales appearing across that long record are evidence of how specific their knowledge of the coast can be. “These are individuals who have figured this out,” she says. “These aren’t just random whales who happen to stumble there.”
Photographs accumulated over decades can show where individual whales return, which other whales they associate with, where injuries appear, how feeding behaviours spread and eventually how generations of whales use the coast. Scientists working collaboratively in British Columbia are now following some humpback family lines into their fourth generation, possibly their fifth.
A newer kind of record may be joining the photographs. During the Central Coast trip, Felicia and her colleagues collected 16 environmental DNA samples for a project led by University of Victoria doctoral student Amy Migneault: after a known whale dives and moves on, the team collects two litres of water from the patch of ocean it has just occupied and filters out the cells it left behind. The method already lets scientists determine a humpback’s sex reliably. Work is underway to see whether this method can also tell us more about an individual’s genetics. If it works, a whale’s passage through the water could hold invaluable information about population structure, alongside the fluke photographs that have carried this work for decades.
No reliable estimate exists for the number of humpbacks using the British Columbia coast. Nobody knows how long they live, or their typical age at first calving.
“There’s things we’re never going to know about humpbacks,” Jackie says.
Sharing the sound
Just days before the MERS team travelled north, on Sunday, August 9, a Fisheries and Oceans Canada Conservation and Protection vessel, a 10-metre rigid-hull inflatable, struck a humpback whale in Fitz Hugh Sound, leaving visible damage to its bow. Two fisheries officers aboard were injured; DFO has kept the extent of their injuries private, citing their health and safety. The whale involved has not been identified, and given how these encounters typically play out, it may never be.
Jackie and Felicia knew about the collision when they arrived, and watched for a newly injured whale during their survey. They didn’t document any humpbacks with new, visible, severe injuries.
That doesn’t establish what happened to the animal. A humpback struck by a vessel can suffer serious internal injuries without any obvious external wound. Jackie has seen it firsthand, in a whale whose only mark of a fatal, blunt-force impact turned up once the necropsy began. Nor can the absence of one whale tell scientists what happened the way it might for most killer whales, whose family groups are documented closely enough that a missing individual can be much stronger evidence that it has died. For humpbacks, without that same long-term family structure, it is often not possible to know that a whale is missing, or dead.
A humpback may disappear on a long dive and reappear somewhere a boater doesn’t expect. Socializing whales change direction unpredictably. A resting humpback can lie almost motionless immediately beneath the surface, its blow disappearing into wind and waves. Felicia watched whales doing exactly that in Fitz Hugh.
Even experience isn’t a guarantee against it: the vessel involved belonged to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, whose officers spend their careers on this water. In a MERS survey of 4,000 British Columbia boaters, 50 percent did not know the legal approach distances from whales, and 40 percent believed humpbacks fed in warm water, gaps that carry far greater risk for boaters who don’t understand the whales’ needs and behaviour, and the kind that led MERS to build its Whale-Safe Boating course, an online resource combining boater safety information with Marine Mammal Regulations and best practices.
“Accidents do happen and anybody can have the terrible misfortune of hitting a whale,” Jackie says. “So much can be achieved by understanding what the whales are doing.”
The irony is difficult to miss. The whales may know Fitz Hugh extraordinarily well. People are still learning how to share it with them.
For Felicia, that was perhaps the most striking thing about seeing Fitz Hugh Sound for the first time. The sound was new to her. To Calvert, Whiskers and the other humpbacks moving through its deep water, it was anything but.
