DANA POINT – Whale experts are calling a video of a blue whale nursing its baby calf just off the Dana Point Headlands an unusual and rare sighting.

The drone video taken by Frank Brennan, a boat captain for Dana Wharf Sportfishing and Whale Watching, shows an approximately 80-foot blue whale mom swimming north with her four- to six -month calf in tow. The pair were just off the Headlands when Brennan noticed them during a midday trip in June.

He watched as the calf arched up and then dipped down beneath the mother about halfway down along her left side. The mother stayed at the surface while the calf dipped below her. The calf stayed under her for about 30 seconds and then popped back up on her other side.

The calf repeated the behavior a few times, each time coming up on the alternate side. Then both animals arched up dove down in the ocean together.

The sighting was something Brennan, who’s worked 20 years for Dana Wharf, said he had never seen before.

But for Alisa Schulman-Janiger, a marine biologist and director of the ACS-LA Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project at Point Vicente, the behavior was somewhat familiar.

Schulman-Janiger said she regularly sees the nursing behavior among the hundreds of gray whales that migrate off the Southern California coastline between the Bering Sea of Alaska and the birthing lagoons in Baja. She’s also observed nursing behavior in humpback whales, and a few times with fin whales and blue whales.



“I have never seen actual nursing with clear underwater views as seen in this video,” Schulman-Janiger said.

“Blue whales nurse all the time but everything happens under water,” she said. “We don’t get to see many blue whales and their calves in the first place. To see a blue whale and a calf nursing, everything has to come together perfectly.”

Lei Lani Stelle, a biology professor at the University of Redlands, was excited to see the footage because it was unusually clear.

“From a boat at the water’s surface it is very hard to tell what the animals are doing,” she said. “It may be possible to infer nursing based on the calf swimming under the mom and neither one moving very quickly but it would be much harder to confirm. I was so excited when Donna sent me this clip as the nursing behavior is unusually clear.”

Stelle, who does research work aboard some of the Dana Wharf boats during the summer months, said she has requested the unedited footage to analyze the frequency and duration of the nursing bouts.

Blue whales feed off Southern California but breed and give birth in warmer waters. Experts don’t know much about their nursing behaviors because it is hard to document.

A female has a calf every two to three years at the most. They nurse their calves for about six months, so the young travel with the mom to the feeding grounds, where they will be weaned.

Donna Kalez, who runs Dana Wharf, recently found the footage when she reviewed some video taken this summer. Brennan had reported the sighting to her the day he saw it, but Kalez was busy and kept planning to review the tapes. The footage got buried with other videos until just days ago when she found it.

“I had to ask a few of my captains what I was looking at,” Kalez said. “I also looked up a viral video that NatGeo released a few months ago on pygmy blue whale nursing. Then I was like, ‘Wow, Frank really saw something cool.’”

In 2015, Mark Girardeau spotted a similar scene off Crystal Cove State Beach.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2254 or eritchie@ocregister.com or on Twitter:@lagunaini