The Whale Record

From the ʻAuʻau Channel to the wider Pacific, Whale Trust researchers have spent 25 years documenting Maui’s humpback whale song and behavior.

story by Chris Amundson | archival photographs by Flip Nicklin

Listening to Humpback Whales in the ʻAuʻau Channel

Before the whale surfaces in the ʻAuʻau Channel, Jim Darling already has it in his headphones. There, a singer’s moans, cries and repeated phrases carry through the water long before anyone sees a blow. Meagan Jones writes down time, position and every surface event.

Flip Nicklin holds his camera on the flukeprint where the whale last sounded. Then the whale surfaces once off the bow and is gone again.

For 25 years, Whale Trust has returned to the shallow waters between Maui, Lānaʻi and Kahoʻolawe to listen, track, record and study. Founded in 2001 by Darling, Nicklin and Jones, the organization grew out of winter seasons in Maui waters – following singers, tracking females and testing accepted ideas against years of observation.

Over time, their research helped change how scientists and the public understand humpback whale song, breeding-ground behavior and the enigmatic humpback whale itself.

What Humpback Whale Song Means

At the nucleus of Whale Trust research is Jim Darling, who had been studying humpback whales long before its founding. For decades, he recorded singers in Hawaiian waters, tracing how songs were built and how they changed from season to season.

“You can describe structure. You can describe change,” he said. “Meaning is another matter.”

The way to test meaning was to observe.

Why Maui Matters to Whale Research

Maui made that possible. In the clear, calm water of the ʻAuʻau Channel, the team could do more than record singers. They could follow individual whales, see who joined them and watch those interactions unfold over time.

Through science, photography and videography, Whale Trust helped build a new picture of how singers interacted with other whales – one that would have been harder to capture in rougher water or places with fewer whales. For many years, Darling and Jones led the science, while Nicklin documented it through photography.

Following Maui’s Singing Whales

In the winter of 1996, Darling and Nicklin returned to the waters off Olowalu to begin a field study of who actually joined a singing whale. Over repeated follows, they tracked singers, recorded their songs and logged which whales joined, which left and which did not approach. DNA analysis later helped confirm the sex of the whales that joined the singers.

For years, humpback song was widely believed to be a display used by males to attract females. What Darling and Nicklin observed off Olowalu challenged that idea. The joiners were always males. Their observations helped shift scientific thinking about humpback song. Rather than a courtship display, song appeared to organize male interactions on the breeding grounds, where behavior ranged from competitive to non-agonistic – close-range encounters without obvious aggression – and at times cooperative.

After years of observational work and additional research, the team turned to playback experiments. Off Olowalu again, Darling, Jones and Nicklin worked from two boats set 1 kilometer apart in the channel. One stayed with the singer, recording and identifying the whale before the playback began. The second lowered an underwater speaker and broadcast a recorded song through the water.

“Within about seven seconds,” Darling said, the whale stopped singing and disappeared.

The team saw nothing for several minutes. Then Nicklin, on the playback boat, looked down and saw the whale with its nose at the speaker.

Humpback whale song is a layered sequence of sounds that can last from five to 20 minutes. Individual units combine into phrases, phrases repeat as themes, and the song shifts through a series of themes before beginning again.

By the next season, parts of the song have shifted. In different parts of the Pacific, some of the same phrases can turn up thousands of miles apart. Season by season in Maui waters, Whale Trust built one of the largest collections of humpback whale songs in the world – a long record that later widened into North Pacific comparisons.

A New Hypothesis About Whale Song

Those years of fieldwork culminated in a 2006 paper by Darling, Jones and Nicklin that proposed a new hypothesis: humpback whale song may organize males on the breeding grounds rather than mainly attract females.

That line of inquiry widened beyond Maui. Later studies compared songs recorded in Hawaii, Mexico, Japan and the Philippines, showing both shared phrases across the North Pacific and year-to-year shifts in how closely those populations aligned. What began here as a question about singers and the whales around them became part of a larger picture of how humpback song changes across time and space.

Whale Trust researchers are now exploring whether machine learning can help them better understand what whale songs mean within whale societies and how those songs move across the Pacific.

But the singer study also led to another question: if song was organizing relations among males, what role did females play?

Studying Female Humpback Behavior

Jones came to whale research through the study of behavior, working first in child development before a graduate opportunity in dolphin communication drew her into marine mammal research and to Hawaiʻi. Her focus turned to females, whose behavior could not be tracked through song.

On the breeding grounds, females move with calves, with escorts or alone. Jones studied their reactions by playing recorded whale sounds underwater and watching what changed. Some sounds drew little reaction. Others changed their movement at once.

When the team played social sounds to females with calves, Jones said, the mothers would sometimes move off fast – as fast as 12 kilometers per hour.

In those cases, “As soon as the playback stopped, she would stop,” Jones said.

Females without calves reacted differently. Some barely moved, holding their position even as the water around them changed. The males nearby did not. They surged, turned and circled, reacting to something they seemed to hear but could not locate.

“The males would go crazy,” Jones said.

They were responding to a signal, but not one they could resolve. Without a visible rival, their movement became scattered, searching.

For Jones, moments like that are where behavior resists easy interpretation. What looks like one behavior can mean something entirely different depending on the female’s reproductive state.

“Until you understand that, you don’t really know what you’re seeing,” she said. “We’re interpreting it the best we can.”

To build that understanding, Jones connects what is visible at the surface with what is happening biologically. Small blubber samples are analyzed for hormones, allowing the team to compare what a female is doing with whether she is late pregnant or not pregnant at all.

Some encounters yield that kind of data. Others are documented through photography and video, one sequence at a time. Together, those observations have helped show how female behavior can shift with reproductive state on the breeding grounds.

In a 2022 Aquatic Mammals paper, Jones, Nicklin and Darling described one such sequence Nicklin captured while diving with whales off Maui: a female humpback positioning her genital-mammary area to intercept bubbles emitted by males below her.

The paper suggested two possible contexts: mating, in which the bubbles may serve as pre-copulatory stimulation, and late-stage pregnancy, when the bubbles could stimulate oxytocin to help induce birth. While the behavior can be documented and described, its meaning and purpose remain unresolved.

Photography as a Research Record

Capturing such moments underwater has long been part of Whale Trust’s research. At times, Nicklin is in the water with the whales, working under special research permits and filming at close range. He describes himself as shooting “over the shoulder of the science,” using the camera to document behavior clearly enough for researchers to study later.

That role began early. Growing up in San Diego, Nicklin watched his father’s career turn toward underwater whale photography after a 1963 encounter with a whale drew national attention and led to work with National Geographic.

In 1979, Nicklin came to Maui to shoot production stills of humpbacks for the IMAX film Nomads of the Deep. Darling served as the film’s scientific liaison and asked him to free-dive beneath a singing whale and photograph the genital area to confirm the whale’s sex.
Nicklin remembers the sound first.

“It’s jet-engine loud,” he said. “As you get down by the tail, the sounds are punching your air spaces.”

Then the whale moved and the tail lifted over him.

“I think it’s just going to pound me into the sand,” he said.

Instead, the whale turned and looked back at him. The shift, Nicklin said later, was from thinking it might hurt him to realizing it just wanted to know what was going on. That experience was Nicklin’s first foray into scientific photography.

For decades, Nicklin’s photographs and underwater footage have become part of the research record itself, preserving behavior that field notes alone could not. Over time, that visual record extended beyond Nicklin. Underwater videographer Jason Sturgis and underwater photographer Ralph Pace became part of Whale Trust’s research as well.

Whale Trust’s Public Programs

Education was built into Whale Trust from the start. Research fed student programs, naturalist training, books, films and public outreach. Haley Spears came to Whale Trust as a Lahainaluna High School senior through a research mentorship program and is now pursuing a Ph.D. on the hormone research line Jones helped initiate. Her work has taken her into research in both Maui and Alaska.

Whale Tales began in 2006 at The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua, originally under the name Whale Quest. Held each year during whale season, it brings together scientists, photographers, naturalists and the public from around the world. It is Whale Trust’s largest single fundraising and outreach event.

Whale Trust has operated differently from many research organizations. As an independent nonprofit, it has been less beholden than grant-driven programs to outside agendas, government priorities and funding cycles. That independence has let Darling, Jones and Nicklin follow whales where observations lead and return to the same questions over years, sometimes decades. Nicklin puts it simply: do science, follow what whales are doing and share it without agenda.

Rebuilding Whale Trust’s Fieldwork

The Lāhainā fire in 2023 destroyed Whale Trust’s two research boats. It underscored how much the science depends on local support – slips, maintenance, fuel and the people who keep boats in the water.

A donor contributed a replacement boat, helping Whale Trust return to the field. Even with fewer boats, the routine remained: launch, listen, track, record and compare. Research also continued off the water. Whale Trust scientists kept publishing peer-reviewed papers, including a study documenting humpback whale detections in deep tropical ocean between Hawaiʻi and Mexico during the breeding season.

Beyond Maui Nui, Whale Trust researchers follow the local whales to northern feeding grounds, including Alaska, linking Maui observations with a wider Pacific record.

But the center of the record remains here, in the channel where winter field research returns year after year.

A 25-Year Record in Maui Waters

Back in the ʻAuʻau Channel, the season begins to thin. By late spring, the team records fewer encounters on the water as the whales head north. Back on land, Darling listens through the recordings in his headphones, Jones checks her notes and biopsy results, and Nicklin reviews photographs and video. One more winter in Maui waters enters the record.

Learn more about Whale Trust’s research, public programs and Whale Tales at whaletrust.org.