With the Belugas… Out Fishing!

July 3, 2019: The BpJAM is back at sea for the 2019 field season, with the same crew as last year.

The foggy morning forces us to stay docked: it’s hard enough to locate a herd in the fog, much less track it or to get a good sense of ​​the general behaviour of the belugas. Might as well take advantage of the “bad weather” to catch up on our office work.

It’s early afternoon and the fog is dissipating from the waters of the Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park. If we move quickly enough, we still have time before dark to go look for belugas. After searching for a half hour or so, we find a group of belugas downstream of Île Rouge, about mid-channel and off the coast of Baie-Sainte-Catherine. The herd numbers around forty white and grey individuals. Among them is DL1235, which GREMM has been tracking since 1990.

The group is rather difficult to approach, sometimes swimming in multiple directions, sometimes “milling”, i.e. diving repeatedly and resurfacing at the same place. The behaviour displayed by these belugas is rather interesting. On the surface, the animals actively swim, spit and vocalize.

After two hours of taking photo-ID pictures to update our “family album”, we decide to launch the drone to get a better idea of ​​what’s going on under the surface.

First we observe sociosexual behaviours: pelvic thrusts, rubbing, etc. Then, what was hard to document from the boat becomes obvious: for the first time, we have a bird’s eye view of belugas hunting for fish.