Artwork > Fluke Sculptures

A peculiar trend in humpback behavior was witnessed in the early months of 2024 in Maui, Hawai’i. Several females suspended their flukes above the waves for one or several minutes at a time, performing a headstand while their calves circled in orbit.

Little underwater footage was recorded to confirm these strange dynamics. Mothers sometimes “fluke-up feed”, bringing their mammary slits towards the ocean surface so that their buoyant calves may nurse within reach of air.

Another interpretation could be “sailing”, where a humpback whale holds their fluke vertically. Whether this is to catch wind for locomotion or for thermal regulation is unknown, but such inversion is noted in the South Atlantic Right whales who aggregate off Argentina’s Patagonia cliffs.

This poplar wood sculpture is of Sailar and her calf, one of the “sailors” I documented on several days through February and March of 2024. This is her second calf reported to the HappyWhale database, with the first sibling seen in 2018. Sailar has also been documented in the Bering Sea off Chukotka, Russia.