The program has found some unusual migrations in individual whales, a board member for Petersburg’s Marine Mammal Center said. “They’ve followed one from Alaska to Hawaii to Japan back to Alaska,” he said. “Made the loop of the North Pacific.”
“Like facial recognition, we can tell who it is,” said Ted Cheeseman, an expedition scientist who has studied whales all over the world, including in Antarctica. He co-founded Happy Whale as a way to track humpbacks, a species that’s known to travel thousands of miles.“Who does the whale hang out with? Does the whale have a calf?” Cheeseman said. “What is the larger story here such that we can build family relationships and so on, tell more of the story of the individual.
The program started with 18,000 whale photos that had been previously identified by hand. Cheeseman says Happy Whale is more efficient. Participants are rewarded for their work. They usually get an initial response within a few days to a week and get notices when their whale is spotted again. Rogers encourages his clients to send in their photos as well. He says other tracking systems, including satellite tags, can fall off whales within days.
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