Danielle Sabean is thrilled that a pilot whale visited her workplace on Monday, although a marine mammal conservation group is concerned that it seemed to be alone.
“It was right in the marina,” Sabean, executive assistant at the Dartmouth Yacht Club, said on Tuesday. “We could see it on our webcam here in the office and then (we) went down. Standing on the edge of the dock, I must have been maybe two feet away from it at some point. It was pretty cool.”
Sabean posted photos and video from her cellphone to Facebook. The posts took off in popularity, drawing more than 40,000 views and more than 1,000 shares.
She said they first noticed the whale swimming around the boats in their marina at about 3:30 in the afternoon.
Sabean figures the animal was a young one and estimated it was about 2.4 metres long.
“He was definitely smaller than I thought he was going to be,” she said. “He was really grey and shiny. When he moved you could see a little bit of white underneath of him. Some of the members of the yacht club, when I had posted the videos of him, thought that he might have been an orca at first. (But it) definitely was not an orca whale.
“It was just really cool to see.”
The yacht club is located in Wright’s Cove on the northeast side of the Bedford Basin. Sabean said the facilities have breakwaters around the area to protect the boats moored at the marinas.
She was very excited to see the whale, as she has an interest in marine life. She had once considered going into marine biology but chose business instead.
She was talking about whales with yacht club manager Dan Gallina just a couple of days ago.
“The funny part is . . . this Friday past, I asked Dan, because I had just started here a few months ago, if there had ever been a whale in the marina because I just thought that’d be really cool. And he was like, ‘No, that’s never happened, actually,’ and then just yesterday there was a whale in the marina.”
Sabean said the pilot whale was still at the club when they left for the day at 5 p.m. but was not there on Tuesday.
“When we came in this morning, it looked like he figured out how to get out of the marina, which is great,” she said. “So, yeah, we’re thinking he was trying to get back out to where his pod is because it’s not normal, usually, for them to be alone.”
For Andrew Reid, a response co-ordinator with the Marine Animal Response Society, seeing a lone pilot whale is not a good sign.
“With any toothed whale species it’s always a little bit concerning when we have one animal on its own,” he said. “Typically they should be travelling with their family. Sometimes they will travel off a little distance but generally they should be with their pods.”
He was also concerned for the health of the whale, as it looked to be quite thin from what he could tell from the photos the society has seen.
“There might be a long-term sickness or injury that’s preventing it from feeding properly,” he said.
“Our understanding is that it hasn’t been seen today (Tuesday) but it wouldn’t be surprising if this animal showed up again.”
The society is a charitable organization dedicated to marine mammal conservation.
Reid said they received multiple reports about the animal from different sighting locations around the Bedford Basin.
“One of our members did try to get down to document it but it had already been gone at that point,” he said.
He felt if Sabean’s estimate of the whale’s length is accurate it would mean it is a juvenile. Adults commonly are about five metres long.
Reid said it’s not out of the question that the young whale might have reunited with its pod.
“Definitely it’s possible. Hopefully, that would be the happy end of the story, but essentially it’s questionable whether that would happen or not.”