September 2 -- Ten hours on the water chasing whales can make for an interesting dinner conversation. Or not.

"We were collecting skin samples with nets after a breach today and noticed whale lice," chirps Sue, one of the student interns. A sample of the parasite, she adds, is preserved in a tube that's stored handily in our food chest -- right next to the "Laughing Cow" cheese wedges.

"There are a couple of different species (of lice)," Sue adds. "Have you seen any yet?"

"No," I answer, staring at my spoon. It's not the mention of lice that dampens my appetite. It's the repetition of rice. This is my third heaping bowlful today; my umpteenth since arriving on Nosy Mangabe. The people of Madagascar consume more rice per capita than any other people in the world. And while we're hear, we're eating a Malagasy diet.

We ate pasta and potatoes over hot rice for breakfast (leftovers from dinner last night); cold, salted rice in a baggie (leftover from breakfast) for lunch on the boat; and now, beans over rice for dinner. Carrots and cabbage over rice is a rarer treat. My hands-down favorite dish so far: French fries over rice.

I almost forgot: To drink, there's "ranonapango," burnt rice water, noon and night.

Rice is like rain. There's plenty of it, and there's no stopping it. Gervais, our Malagasy cook, charms us three times a day with his semi-toothless smile as he transfers the predictable contents of his big, steaming iron pot into plastic serving bowls that have been scraped to faded shades of orange and green.

These petty complaints are a sure sign that I -- and many of us at Camp Nosy Mangabe -- are merely visitors to Madagascar. We're like the humpbacks in that way. And like the humpbacks, we'll return to another place soon to a life of plenty, where we rarely if ever have to worry about having enough to eat. Many people in Madagascar and in other developing countries, we know, never have the luxury of grumbling about a food based on something as unimportant as how it tastes.

"Can someone pass the chili sauce, please?"

The whale team, over the past month, has experimented with every combination of available condiments, creating a range of culinary concoctions as they attempt to doctor this staple of the Malagasy diet. Some mix it with honey, peanut butter or hot sauce; others with mustard, condensed milk or chocolate.

Gervais' repertoire would potentially improve a bit if there were refrigeration on Nosy Mangabe. But, as Howard says, you can't sail a refrigerator. He'd rather have another boat, of course. So much for fois gras.

Whale Fasting

Simply put, eating is not a priority here. Not for the whale team. And not for the whales, either. Their job in Antongil Bay's warm, protected waters is to mate and give birth. Although the humpbacks may have fed opportunistically on small fish along the migration route, they haven't enjoyed a satisfying swarm of krill since leaving Antarctica, where they are thought to spend the spring, summer and fall.

The whales gorge themselves during the nine months of the year that they're in food-rich polar waters. Then they fast when they're in the tropics. Of all the whale behaviors we're witnessing here -- breaching, lobtailing, flippering, spyhopping and singing -- none has anything to do with feeding, the activities surrounding which can be equally diverse and spectacular.

We've not seen bubble-netting, for instance, nor are we likely to. When a humpback dives beneath a tasty school of fish, it releases columns of bubbles from its blowholes as it spirals back up to the surface of the water. The resulting net-like barrier of bubbles can be 150 feet across: big enough to trap and concentrate a lot of disoriented fish. All that's left for the whale to do is swim through the cloud, its huge mouth open to full capacity, thanks to expandable pleats on its underside.

The humpback has comb-like baleen plates, not teeth, through which it filters massive quantities of water and food. Baleen is made of keratin, the same stuff as our fingernails. It's usually black or olive brown in color, often with grayish white bristles.

Baleen plates tend to be longest near the back of the mouth and taper away to smaller ones near the front. In humpbacks, the plates are relatively short and wide: 3 feet long by 1 foot wide. The number of plates varies according to the species: a minimum of 280 in the gray whale to a maximum of 946 for a fin whale. Humpbacks have up to 800 plates.

As food accumulates on the sieve-like baleen, the whale swipes it away with its massive tongue, propelling it down a gullet that's as round as our cook's biggest cauldron.

As a warm-blooded mammal living in water, the humpback whale needs to expend a lot of energy just to maintain a constant body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Especially in the polar feeding grounds, 6 inches of dense insulation known as blubber comes in particularly handy. So does a ton of food per day, during feeding seasons.

A humpback can gulp about 150 pounds of krill, tiny shrimp-like crustaceans, in one feeding lunge. It eats about 4 percent of its own body weight -- or about a ton of food -- every day when it's feeding. Someone from the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Mass., estimates that's the equivalent of 2,000 boxes of spaghetti. I figure it equals beaucoup bowls of rice.

Although humpbacks retain a sense of taste, it is secondary to hearing, sight and touch.

Scientists have observed humpbacks cooperating with each other in order to increase their food intake. However, they tend to be less social than other species like killer whales or bottle-nosed dolphins, which co-exist in stable groups known as pods. Humpbacks are nomadic but not exactly loners. They tend to associate with lots of different individuals while they cover a wide range in search of prey.

Despite their massive size, humpbacks can also become the prey. Howard has published (in Marine Mammal Science) one of the only descriptions of humpbacks being attacked by killer whales, a frenzied scene he witnessed in a breeding area off the coast of Colombia, South America. Here in Madagascar, we've seen some rake marks on a tail fluke here and there, and a tattered dorsal fin or two. These could be injuries from fishing nets -- or the result of attacks from sharks or orcas.

Exactly where a particular humpback will migrate to feed is determined by its mother. A few weeks after giving birth here in the Bay of Antongil, mother humpbacks will lead their nursing calves back to the same feeding grounds they came from.

It's only a matter of time now until they set off on that long journey. When they do, we won't say goodbye, we'll say -- as they do in Madagascar -- "Mazotoa Homana!"

In other words, bon appétit!

Previous Report     Next Report