Name Game: Researchers study tail patterns for help with names
Like participants in a mass Rorschach test, they sat in rows five deep, staring at images of whale tails flased on a screen in front of them.
Marine biologists, oceanographers and whale researchers, they had come from all over New England for this ritual, last year's annual Humpback Whale Naming Party. The descriptive names they chose would stay with these animals forever.
In an animated stream of consciousness, the researchers looked carefully at the black and white pigmentation patterns on the underside of a tail, shouting out any shapes or objects that occurred to them.
The patterns, displayed when humpbacks raise their tails to dive, are among the best ways to identify the whales in the wild. Like human fingerprints, the tail markings develop before the whales are born and remain unchanged throughout the animals' lives.
Since the late 1970s, scientists have been photographing members of the Gulf of Maine humpback population and then meeting to scan the tail photos for name-worthy identifying characteristics.
On this Saturday afternoon in April, they were intently studying a hairbrush-shaped black splotch in a white area on the left side of one individual's tail.
"Ladle!" a researcher shouted.
The crowd groaned. The mark was too square to be a ladle.
"Toothbrush!" yelled another.
Nods and smiles all around. They liked that one. By a show of hands, they unanimously agreed - the whale whose tail appeared before them would, from this point on, be known to researchers from Provincetown to the Bahamas as "Toothbrush."
In all, researchers named 97 new humpback whales last year, the most since humpback research began here in 1976 - and a welcome rise in the census after several years of decline. Thirty-seven of the new whales were claves, the most ever. The other 60 were juveniles, a number also unmatched this decade.
While some researchers cheer the data as evidence that this once-endangered population is bouncing back, others caution that the record year suggests only that whales came close to shore because there was an abundance of fish. In years when there were fewer fish to feed on, earlier in this decade, for example, there are fewer whales they say.
But no matter how you interpret the data, researchers say, get the binoculars ready; New England whale watchers are in for a record couple of years.
The Gulf of Maine humpback population returns to the nutrient-rich waters off New England each spring. They feed here from April to October, then head south for the winter, to mate and birth their young in the Carribean. Researchers use photographs to monitor which whales show up where, and when. Pictures of all whales that have been sighted in the gulf previously are on file at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, so when scientists spot what they think is a new whale, they check the catalog to make sure they haven't recorded it before. The catalog now contains almost 1,300 identification photos.
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