Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Here's a video of that rare sperm whale seen off B.C.'s coast

A sperm whale was spotted in B.C.’s Johnstone Strait on Monday. Photograph By JARED TOWERS A sperm whale has been spotted off the coast of B.C. for the first time in decades.

 A sperm whale was spotted in B.C.'s Johnstone Strait on Monday.A sperm whale was spotted in B.C.’s Johnstone Strait on Monday. Photograph By JARED TOWERS

A sperm whale has been spotted off the coast of B.C. for the first time in decades.

Tipped off to its presence by an unmistakeable series of clicks coming from an underwater microphone in the waters of Johnstone Strait, area researchers were reportedly shocked by the discovery.

"Personally, I've worked and lived in this area almost all my life, over 30 years, and I've never known of a sperm whale sighting in this area or in any coastal waters of British Columbia," cetacean ecologist Jared Towers told CBC News.

According to CBC, the last confirmed report of a sperm whale off the east coast of Vancouver Island was in the form of an audio recording from 1984.

The male is believed to be a juvenile of roughly 12 metres in length, compared to the 17-20 metres that some adult males can reach. (Adult females are smaller, at an average of 12 metres in length.)

According to the Marine Mammal Center, the sperm whale is the largest toothed whale. Their skin is wrinkled to increase surface area for heat loss, they are dark gray in color, with a hump rather than a dorsal fin, and usually display their tail flukes when they dive.

CBC reports that the whale has been in the strait for about a week, but why it made the trek into the channel remains unclear.