38Talk:
A Forum for Discussions among Voyagers and Others related to the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan
Re: Pepper and Shuffleboard
From: UNK
Date: 2014 Oct 22, 08:14 -1000
Sent from my iPhone
From: UNK
Date: 2014 Oct 22, 08:14 -1000
Hello All,
A bit of info I've learned while crewing whale watches. Each Humpback has a unique pattern of white on it's tail, as unique as our fingerprints. Since the '70s on Stellwagen Bank/Gulf of Maine they have been photographed, named and catalogued. The names are non-gender based as until a female shows up on Stellwagen with a calf, the gender is not known. The listing is called the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog. As I understand it the names are from people's suggestions and sometimes come from a sort of Rorschach Test of the tail pattern. There is one whale named Nile who's pattern resembled the path of the river. Hope this helps.
Fair winds,
Tom Sullivan
Sent from my iPhone
Frank, how confident can you be that you have identified such individual whales? They don't appear much different to me.
For anyone: who names these whales?! Is there a dataset on the web where I may see a list of identified humpback whales?
Thank you. André.
