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Naturalist Shares Love Affair with Whales as
Head of Aquarium Cruises
Ioana Patringenaru | February 26, 2007
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| Crystal De Soto is about to kiss a picture of a whale on a mural at the Birch Aquarium. |
Click here to view the slide show. |
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Crystal De Soto learned about great whales and their
migrations when she was in high school. But whale-watching
season was over in San Diego. So, De Soto and her
mother got into the car and drove through to La Bufadora,
a small town about 20 miles south of Ensenada in Baja
California. Finally, they saw a few blowholes in the
distance.
“I saw them, and from then on, it was all over,”
said De Soto, who now acts as the lead of the whale-watching
program at the Birch Aquarium at UCSD's Scripps Institution
of Oceanography.
The program’s goal is to make people more aware of the marine and animal life thriving in San Diego County. It can pass on a conservation message to as many as 500 people a day, De Soto said.
“San Diego is where civilization meets the
wild,”is how she puts it. “It’s
like going out on a safari to meet big game.”
Her job at the aquarium is to make sure that about 90 staff members and volunteers receive the proper training to deliver that message. This year, De Soto put together a 100-page training manual. Naturalists also rehearsed their speeches on boats.
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| Naturalist and UCSD senior Chelsea Rochman. |
Click here for an audio clip of gray whale sounds. (Courtesy of the Marine Systems Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD) |
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Chelsea Rochman, a UCSD senior and biology major, was one of them. It’s her first season as a naturalist. She gives a running commentary during whale-watching trips, heavy on whale facts and the history of San Diego Bay. She works two to three days a week, doing two cruises a day. “I love being out on the water,” she said. “It’s really exciting to see whales. It never gets old.”
Rochman still remembers the first time she saw a
baleen whale, a humpback, in Boston. She got so excited
that she started crying. But on a recent Wednesday
morning, she kept her cool as a juvenile whale decided
to jump out of the water during one of the tours she
was narrating that day. That behavior is called breaching
and is a rare sight, as whales don’t usually
do this while they’re migrating, Rochman explained.
A little later in the three-hour cruise, another whale
decided to surface close to the boat, giving passengers
a good view of its blowhole, tail and barnacle-covered
back. Notice those orange spots on the whale’s
back? Rochman asked. They’re whale lice, she
explained. They actually look a little bit like millipedes.
Whales usually travel along the Southern California
coast in January and February, after leaving their
feeding grounds in the Bering Sea, off Alaska, in
November and December, said Erin Olson, a post doctoral
student at the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps.
They’re headed for lagoons in Baja California,
where they will mate and give birth to their calves.
They start heading back north in late February and
March, but some mothers and calves can linger on later,
Olson said. About 22,000 whales make the trip every
year, she said. They travel 10,000 to 12,000 miles.
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| View a video of Crystal De Soto talking about the whale watching program at the Birch Aquarium. |
View a video of De Soto talking about typical whale behaviors. |
View a video of De Soto talking about her first whale encounter. |
All video clips require Quicktime software and a high-speed internet connection.
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During her years as a naturalist, De Soto has seen quite a few amazing behaviors. She still remembers a trip around Valentine’s Day, when she saw gray whales courting. Two or three males swam around a female. The 45-foot giants rolled around in the water, while dolphins looked on. Mother Nature herself seemed to be saying: “Happy Valentine’s Day, love is in the air,” De Soto recalls.
The Birch Aquarium offers five overnight trips to Baja California to get a closer look at the giant mammals. They take visitors to the San Ignacio and Scammon’s lagoons. The highlight of the trips is a ride among gray whales and their calves in 16-foot fishing boats. Up to 900 whales can congregate in each lagoon, De Soto said. “It’s like a parade of whales,” she said. “It’s just an amazing experience.”
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| A whale surfaces near a boat during a recent whale-watching trip. |
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The aquarium also partners with San Diego Harbor
Excursion to offer daily whale-watching trips from
Dec. 26 to April 1. They take San Diegans and tourists
on three-hour journeys off Point Loma twice a day.
In addition to whale sightings and informed commentary,
volunteers show off barnacles and whale lice enclosed
in jars. They also pass around samples of baleen,
which whales use to filter their food from ocean water.
Passengers are also treated to a sample of gray whale
songs. They don’t sound anything like humpback
whales’ elaborate songs, Rochman pointed out.
In fact, they sound more like broken plumbing.
Passengers Kimmy Nice and Nicole Vriesman said they
were impressed with the whole experience. “It
was amazing,” Nice said. “It’s cool
seeing whales in their natural habitat,” Vriesman
added.
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