00:12UNBELIEVABLE!
00:19The funny thing about humpback whales is they actually smell really bad.
00:23So when they're in those feeding groups, they're feeding on krill, which are very fishy,
00:27and they actually burp and they fart all the time.
00:30So the smell was really overpowering. The sounds were incredible.
00:34When they were breathing all over us, we were getting drenched in whale exhalation.
00:42It was really a sensory experience.
00:55On one particular day, on the 30th of December, about 100 kilometers north of Cape Town,
01:00we were greeted by what I could only describe as a Manhattan skyline,
01:05with huge plumes of whale breath greeting us like skyscrapers.
01:09Very quickly, we realized we were looking at a site we had never seen before in our lives,
01:14and that was of hundreds of whales coming together to feed in one small area.
01:18And it was truly breathtaking, not only as a naturalist, but as a fine art photographer.
01:43How do you ever do something like this justice?
01:49Supergroups have not been seen until about 2012 when the first were kind of recorded,
01:54and it's very likely a result of a recovery of the population from whaling.
02:00So humpback whales were severely hunted to very low numbers,
02:04and so it would be a natural phenomenon to see less whales and therefore no supergroups.
02:09But as these whales recover from whaling and populations rebound, these supergroups are forming again.
02:29So with more whales, we have a higher risk, obviously, of a ship strike or boat strikes.
02:34In other words, you've got a lot of tankers and cargo ships coming around our coastline,
02:39we have fishing vessels, etc., and we do on the occasion find a carcass that comes ashore
02:44and we can very clearly see because we'll see the propeller strike often through the whale's body.
02:48So it's like these big cuts in the whale's body that have come from a propeller.
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