look. Baby Moby Dick? Photographing a rare baby beluga whale off Australia | the animals

The video was posted to Facebook on July 28 by Jaydyn Mathewson, an amateur drone pilot. He took the photos off the coast of New South Wales in Western Australia. Between June and August, the Southern Hemisphere winter, several thousand humpback whales swim from Antarctica to the warm turquoise waters off the smallest continent to get through the colder months.

This is not the first time that beluga humpback whales have been sighted this (Australian) winter. A few weeks earlier, Wally Franklin of the nature organization The Oceania Project shared photos of a very young white humpback whale. According to Franklin, who has spent decades protecting megafauna, the whale was probably only a few days old.

With their stark white skin, the little whales are reminiscent of Moby Dick, the fictional whale immortalized by writer Herman Melville in his 1851 novel of the same name, bitten off his leg.

But where the fictional Moby Dick was a sperm whale, these calves are humpback whales, known as benign, intelligent whales that communicate with each other over great distances through intricate “songs.” Humpback whales can reach 40 feet in length and have a life expectancy of more than 50 years.

According to Franklin, it is likely not belugas, but a lighter and less rare variation on the dark gray normal skin of young humpback whales. “They are born with a skin color that looks very pale and white in the light, which is why they are mistakenly thought to be albino,” the cetacean expert told Live Science.

Or not, the fact that several beluga whales have been sighted recently from Australia is good news, according to the site. While humpback whales were nearly wiped out by whaling in the 1960s, strict protections have led to an explosion in the animals over the past half century. As a result, the chance of seeing a white whale cub increases every year.