Whales have many aspects that are still a mystery to humans. One I personally wanted to research more was pod types. According to earthtrust.org, a pod is “a social group of whales.” It goes on to say that in Hawaii, a pod usually has 2 or 3 whales per pod.
My question was: "What type of pod is most often for whales to be in at different times in the season?" I thought mother and calf pods were going to be the most common since the whales come here to give birth. Whale babies are given a lot of attention, so finding them wouldn’t be that hard. I thought if we saw a lot of calf and mother pods on the initial observation, we'd see more on our second observation.
As you can see by the chart, the mother and calf group ties with the single adults and competition pods in the month of January. There were no mother and calf pods plus escort pods seen in January. The most frequently seen pods in March were the competition and single adult, followed by a mother and calf pod, with one mother, calf, and escort group.
Conclusion and possible sources of error: The mother and calf pods were not the most frequent in either month. It tied with two other groups during the first observation, but came in last on the second observation. My prediction was incorrect. Possible sources of error could include not being able to see as many whales on the whale watch (we were higher up in January), the possibility of seeing the same pod twice, and miscalculating the number of whales in a pod.
I really enjoyed the whale watch. It's great to be able to actually get out on the water and observe the animals in the their natural habitat. Some schools on the mainland (and even here) only wish they could do things like this, so it's great we got to take advantage of it. You can study about whales in a classroom all day, but it just won't be the same as actually getting to see them.
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