A local whale-watching excursion turned into a “once-in-a-lifetime” event when a vessel encountered a\u00a0super-pod of over 100 shortfin pilot whales\u00a0off the San Diego coast.<\/p>\n
CBS 8 reports the rare sighting occurred 20 miles southwest of Mission Bay near the Mexican border. Passengers aboard the Gone Whale Watching tour were originally searching for orcas when they spotted an overwhelming number of blows on the horizon.<\/p>\n
“I saw some spouts out, and there were a lot of them,” said deckhand naturalist Nicole Schriber, a marine biologist who had never seen the species in the wild. “At first, I thought they might be the orcas, and then I saw that’s way too many spouts.”<\/p>\n
Captain Jessica Aubry navigated the vessel as the massive pod played and dove for squid alongside Pacific white-sided dolphins.<\/p>\n
Shortfin pilot whales typically reside in the warmer waters of the\u00a0Sea of Cortez. This encounter marks San Diego’s\u00a0first documented pilot whale sighting since 2017. Marine experts believe a powerful El Ni\u00f1o system warming the Pacific could bring more rare, tropical marine life to the Southern California coast throughout the winter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A local whale-watching excursion turned into a “once-in-a-lifetime” event when a vessel encountered a\u00a0super-pod of over 100 shortfin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[66938,23,100,74,76,75,19764],"class_list":["post-485834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-kogo-news","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-whale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}