Mysterious Blainville’s Beaked Whale Makes An Appearance In Hawaii

Whale season in Hawaii usually means majestic humpbacks bumping into boatsswimming with dolphins

Last week, Hawaii Island photographer Lisa Denningon a boat near Kaiwi Point

Blainville’s beaked whales, which look like obese spinner dolphins, are normally very elusive, but when Denning jumped in the water with her camera, the pair stuck around for about 25 minutes. She even captured four minutes of up close and personal video footage with them, above.

“Typically, they are very shy,” Denning told local station KITV

Luckily for her (and us), these two wanted to play.

Denning told the Big Island’s West Hawaii Today newspaper

Blainville’s beaked whales can be as long as 20 feet and weigh as much as 2,300 poundsat deep depths

Because they swim so deep — they’ve been known to dive seven times deeper

Biologist Robin Baird of the Cascadia Research Collective has been documenting these and other whales for years. He estimated that on average, researchers might have .75 sightings of a Blainville’s beaked whale for every 100 hours of observation

“These guys are very stealthy,” Whitlow Au, a chief scientist at the University of Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology

As a result, Blainville’s beaked whales are somewhat of a mystery: Scientists don’t know how many there are, or what their life span is

Denning knows how lucky her chance encounter was, telling KITV that it was a “really neat and beautiful experience.”

Au was even more excited about it: “The video was amazing!” he told HuffPost.

We couldn’t agree more.