Whale Sightings Surge Around the Bay Area, Stirring Up a Frenzy on Facebook

As fog burned off the Pacific Ocean on Monday evening, Sally and David Maynard headed to the Pacifica Pier in search of whales.

“You see a little black mark come up, and we heard a spout,” Sally said. “A couple [told us] that another one stopped and looked like he was playing and leaping, but we missed that.”

The couple had made the trek from Menlo Park to spend the whole day scouting for humpbacks along Pacifica’s beaches, joining the throngs of people streaming into the coastal town just south of San Francisco in recent weeks.

They come in search of a whale frenzy not far from shore, intrigued by citizen scientists and semi-professional photographers posting about their sightings on Facebook.

The whales, on the other hand, seem to be driven by a more familiar motivation: food.

A social media-fueled, whale-watching craze

Groups like Pacifica Whalespotting started to blow up in early July as what one resident called “oodles and oodles of whales” began to appear off the Bay Area’s beaches, closer to the coast than veteran watchers are used to.

“I was thinking in June, this is shaping up to just be the worst whale summer in my time here. Then in July, it’s like a light switch flipped,” said Chris Campo, a Pacifica resident and admin in the Pacifica Whalespotting group. He and some other serious whale watchers, including the group’s founder, Robin Brun, have been posting updates in the Whalespotting group since 2021.

Through the years, the group has been sleepy — mostly just a spot for locals to post their best photos and share tips when fan-favorite whales are putting on an especially good show. But this year, it’s taken off.

“Now, instead of the group just being kind of this small ‘Pacifica local folks who are interested in whales’ group, it’s become more of a Bay Area and even beyond Bay Area group. … Our group now contains people from Sacramento and areas that are far beyond,” he said.

At the beginning of the summer, there were about 4,000 people in Pacifica Whalespotting, said David Chamberlin, another group admin. As of Wednesday, it boasts more than 24,700 members.

And the beaches have been busy too.

“Previous to this year, when I would go to one of what I consider the standard viewing locations, I would often be the only photographer out there, or sometimes there would be two or three more,” Chamberlin said. Recently, though, “the pier was lined with photographers all up and down each side. I don’t want to give an exact number, but there must have been at least 30 to 40 people out there.”

Photographers, families with binoculars and fishers have congregated on the pier. Some are following an alert of a sighting in the Whalespotting group; others come in hopes of being the first to see a humpback and getting to do the honors of pointing it out.

Chamberlin said there’s a lot of excitement along the pier when a whale shows up, especially one of their local “celebrities,” including two whales known to the group as Pinky and Fast Willy.

“When one of those two show up, especially because they’re known and named, it’s, ‘Oh, it’s Pinky! Everybody, Pinky is here,’” Chamberlin said. “We saw Fast Willy, and it was just half jogging one direction, stopping, taking photos, and then half jogging again to try and get to another spot because he moves around a lot. Everybody’s excite,d and there’s a great sense of community and participation.”

The reason this year’s season has been so exciting, both longtime whale watchers and scientists say, is because more whales are gathering close to the shore. But why they’re doing this, and what it could mean in the long term, is still somewhat of a mystery.

Why are whales so close to the shore?

The leading theory for why more whales are showing off along the coast is that their food source is abundant in shallow waters this year.

Local populations of anchovies, one of the humpbacks’ major food sources, have seen a boom in the last few years, according to Will Oestreich, a researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Now they’re showing up more in the shallows — driven in large part by rising ocean temperatures, said Elliott Hazen, a research ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“When there’s less cold water, this upwell, nutrient-rich [water] — I call it the ‘oasis’ to a lot of the global warming we have going on in the Pacific — compresses towards the shore, [and] you tend to see more life, more activity in that same close-to-shore habitat,” he said.

Experts also say that more whales are congregating in the area as the region’s population starts to recover from the devastating effects of whaling. One of the last whaling stations in the U.S., located in Richmond, shut down in the 1970s. For animals with longer life cycles, it can take decades to see population recovery.

Specifically, the population of humpback whales, which remain endangered in some parts of the world, appears to be increasing. These baleen whales have always traveled through the Bay Area, heading south to breeding grounds off mainland Mexico and Baja California in the winter.

While this is fun for whale watchers, it can pose safety risks to whales and raises questions about how their populations are shifting.

Are experts worried?

There are risks.

Scientists are watching for potential issues such as an increased risk of ship strikes, entanglement and competition for food, but it seems like the Bay Area has been a “really good success story for conservation,” said Ari Friedlaender, a professor in the ocean sciences department at UC Santa Cruz.

Hazen added that with recovering populations, there will inevitably be more chances for human-wildlife interactions since there are just more whales.

If they congregate in shipping lanes in and out of the Port of San Francisco, whales are at a higher risk of ship strike, which is a leading cause of human-related death. NOAA has developed technology to detect when there is high whale activity in shipping lanes and issue requests for ships to slow down. There’s no binding rule that requires them to slow down, but many do, Hazen said.

“We haven’t seen a huge uptick in ship strikes on the West Coast. But it’s very difficult because ship strikes most often go undetected because it happened,” Hazen told KQED. He noted that increased ship strikes occurred along the East Coast when the North Atlantic right whale population shifted.

The Bay Area’s Dungeness crab fishery also has to work dynamically depending on whale movement since the whales can also get entangled in fishing nets. In 2024, the commercial Dungeness crab season ended early to protect whale populations, according to the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The other thing scientists are keeping an eye on is just how much food the whales have as populations recover. But humpbacks aren’t called the “farmers of the ocean” for no reason.

“They are feeding on prey deep down in the ocean, some species, and then they come up into the photic zone where there’s light, and they poop,” Hazen said. This “fertilizes the ocean and then can actually support these prey populations through increased chlorophyll and then increased forage fish like anchovies or krill.”

Whale watching season seems to be slowing down, Chamberlin and Campo said, but there are still a few popping up along the coast of Pacifica, and experts expect that in future years, they’ll probably continue coming close to shore.

For those who do choose to grab a pair of binoculars and search for a humpback, Campo urges visitors to be respectful of the town.

“If you come to Pacifica, drop some cash in our restaurants, be respectful of the beach, don’t leave trash,” he said.