In nearly a quarter century studying humpback whales, researcher Fred Sharpe has witnessed a remarkable recovery.

The intelligent and social animals have rebounded from centuries of whaling, and are filling in their historic range. Sharpe, a founder of the Alaska Whale Foundation, said the whales have even made a comeback along the California and Oregon coasts, where as recently as the early 1960s some 2,000 humpbacks were killed.

Whaling was largely outlawed in the 1960s, though illegal Russian whaling persisted into the 1970s.

Sharpe attributes the increasing numbers to the humpbacks' flexibility in what they eat -- everything from squid and salmon to small crustaceans -- and their complex social systems.

”They consistently seem to blow the doors off bounded rationality,” Sharpe said.

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