These lucky whale watchers can check a box off of their bucket lists.
A massive blue whale circled a boat off of the coast of southern California on Friday.
The footage was captured off of Newport Beach, California, according to USA Today.
The boaters managed to capture footage of the whale with an overhead drone.
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The curious giant made several passes underneath the small boat.
The craft’s engine had been turned off, according to one photographer. Otherwise, the whale might’ve been too scared to get close.
Curious whales tend to suffer injuries from interactions from motorized boats.
Whale watching can sometimes pose dangers for humans, too. A boat that small isn’t likely to remain afloat in the event of a collision with a breaching whale, Live Science reported.
Would you ever go whale watching?
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The creature’s size is readily apparent from the drone’s angle. The whale dwarfs the medium-size boat, making the humans on board look no bigger than ants in comparison.
The whale surfaces at one point in the drone footage, expelling a spout of water from its blowhole.
Whales are mammals, not fish; they surface to breathe air just like land animals do.
Blue whales aren’t just the largest animal in the sea. They’re the largest animal on Earth, according to National Geographic.
Not only that — they’re the largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth, period. This includes the dinosaurs and other extinct monsters from prehistory.
Blue whales can weight more than 200 tons and grow to a size of more than 100 feet.
In spite of their massive size, they don’t go for humans. Instead, blue whales eat krill, small shrimplike animals, swallowing great volumes of water and filtering the krill into their stomach.
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They’re endangered animals, in great part due to aggressive over-hunting from whalers in the first half of the 20th century. Conservation measures enacted since then have allowed the delicate population of the whales to increase.
The size of the ocean creature makes it easy to see where the biblical story of Jonah and the whale came from.
This kind of animal is surely one of God’s most amazing creations.
