“This isn’t pretty for tourists,” says Dave Snow. Then again, tourists—you know who you are—probably wouldn’t fork over their hard-earned cash just for the chance to watch a pod of orcas slaughter a group of white-beaked dolphins, churning the sea into a froth of blood.
 
But that’s the kind of thing that goes on in nature—or at least the slice of it just off the southern coast of Labrador. Newfoundland and Labrador is where Snow’s company, Wildland Tours, operates its Southern Labrador Adventure expedition. Together with Whale Study Week—a related trip that Snow runs out of St. John’s, NL—the expeditions give marine-mammal enthusiasts something more than the average point-and-click jaunt. These clients actually study whales.
 
“We are census-ing the humpbacks, and we document their injuries,” says Snow, also a marine biologist. “We are doing some primary research that no scientists in the world are looking at.”
 
That’s because these days, many Canadian marine biologists evidently—and understandably—focus their survey work on commercial fish and crustacean stocks. So Snow and his team run a website that serves as a photographic archive of their findings. Among other things, Wildland trips have chronicled what he believes is an unusually high incidence of cetacean predation. “The humpbacks out here are getting chomped on by the orcas, big time,” he notes.

Ready to pack your clipboard? Wildland Tours’ Whale Study Week trips run for three separate weeks in July, while the Southern Labrador Adventure operates in the first week of September. Whale Study Week is limited to 20 people; the Southern Labrador Adventure allows a dozen. And whatever you do, don’t fall out of the boat.