Humpback Whales Bubble Net Feeding on Herring

Drone Pilot / Editor

Each spring in Sitka Sound, massive schools of Pacific herring return to spawn—and with them, humpback whales migrating north from Hawaiʻi and Mexico to feed after months of fasting. Here, humpbacks perform one of the most sophisticated hunting strategies in the animal kingdom: bubble net feeding 🫧 Working together, they spiral beneath the fish, releasing curtains of bubbles to trap entire schools before lunging upward together. They use coordinated calls, instructing individuals by name, to keep the team aligned. I wanted to capture in this short film a sense of what it is like from the surface to watch and wait as the whales dive down, disappear, and like the birds, you wait for where they’ll emerge all at once. Filming whales is tricky, because from the drone you need to be 100 meters above the surface, which is quite far away unless you have a great lens on your drone. But at 100 meters you are right in the flight path of low flying planes, which are all around Sitka. So capturing this behavior had me on the edge of my seat, even with great spotters from the Impact Media Lab team!