not cooperative. The winds were very strong, the seas were very rough and making it very hard to find the blows from our whales. The constant boat traffic most likely threw off our calculations as far as the natural behavior period goes. Unfortunately our data did not turn out very well today, according to our information these whales were able to travel about a mile and a half in about 40 seconds. Oh well… I am sure we will be able to figure something out.Jan. 10th Our first morning trip.After having our first few data collection days in the afternoon, waking up in the morning and getting ready to go was quite amusing. Our team was headed back out to the hill on Olawahu today. The winds were calm and the sky was clear and we were able to successfully track quite a few pods. The only problem is that the whales don’t do anything very exciting when it counts. Today when doing the scan there were a number of calves breaching and tail-slapping. But when it came time for us to pick a pod to track all of the active mother calf pods disappeared. When this happened we just ended up tracking a single male pod because he was all we saw and all he did was dive and blow at the surface.Today in our lecture class we began discussing the ethics and politics of whaling. This lecture was a class lead by fellow students from team 2. Tonight the Japanese and Norwegians were painted as the villains in the story of whale preservation. Japan and Norway still hunt whales today even under the endangered species act. Both nations say that they are hunting a smaller whale known as the Minke Whale. But have been caught by the testing of whale meat in their market places to have hunted and killed at least 13 different endangered species. Japan openly waits out side the 200-mile international boundary waiting for whales to leave U.S. waters so they can hunt them out side of our jurisdiction. I personally find this fact quite disturbing...
