'They actually burp and fart all the time' — Humpback whale supergroup leaves fishy impression

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