Researchers make rare sighting of sperm whale near Alert Bay, B.C.
VANCOUVER — Researchers studying the activity of whales off British Columbia’s coast have had an unusual and “surreal” encounter with a sperm whale.
Jared Towers is part of a Fisheries and Oceans Canada team monitoring the sound of cetaceans and marine mammals using a network of hydrophones in the Johnstone Strait off northeastern Vancouver Island.
Towers said his colleagues at a research station on Hanson Island heard an unusual echolocation and determined on Sunday that the sound didn’t belong to orcas typically found in the area.
“We started inferring that it was a sperm whale and kind of convinced each other that’s what it was,” he said Wednesday.