SEATTLE — It’s thing seals aren’t on a humpback whale’s menu.
A photograph by a whale-watching naturalist captured a seemingly bewildered seal within the mouth of a humpback whale after the large marine mammal by chance gulped it last Thursday within the waters off Anacortes, Washington.
The food mix-up began while a Blue Kingdom Whale and Wildlife Tours boat spotted birds flying over a faculty of fish and a humpback whale swimming toward it, Captain Tyler McKeen said.
He said the humpback then used a lunging feeding technique, where the whale opens its mouth wide and takes in small fish and water.
But as a substitute of remaining underwater afterward to filter through its baleen, it surfaced and started opening and shutting its mouth.
After the whale went back underwater, photographs and videos were checked by whale watchers.
“It only took a pair seconds for everyone to drag up the frames and zoom in,” McKeen said. “That’s once we saw the seal. It was a funny, funny moment for everyone. I mean, it probably wasn’t that funny for the seal.”
A photograph by Brooke Casanova shows the seal, which presumably was also hunting the fish, emerging from the underside of the whale’s mouth.
McKeen recorded a phone video where the seal is getting flushed out.
“I’m guessing that this case probably happens every on occasion simply because there’s a lot of other stuff that eat these fish too,” McKeen said.
Humpback whales visit the Salish Sea, the inland waters between British Columbia and Washington state, during their migrations.
Humpback whales were hunted to local extinction in these waters, but over the past 25 years, their numbers have recovered and are actually routinely seen in whale-watching tours, McKeen said.
He added the whale that by chance gulped the seal is referred to as “Zillion.”
