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<\/a>The unique markings on the underside of a humpback whale\u2019s tail are used to identify individuals. Photos of the tails are compiled into catalogs which are used by researchers investigating the life history of these animals. Photos by (clockwise from top left) Ingo Arndt\/Minden Pictures\/Corbis, Tom Soucek\/AlaskaStock\/Corbis, Ashley Cooper\/Corbis, Joe McDonald\/Corbis<\/p><\/div>\n
The conference program didn\u2019t specifically mention photo-ID, and there was almost nothing published about it at the time, although a 1974 paper by British Columbia researchers Jim Darling and Dave Hatler had noted a distinctively marked gray whale they\u2019d repeatedly seen off the west coast of Vancouver Island. But, as we\u2019d soon learn through conference conversations and from papers published in the years to follow, scientists around the world were noticing that the whales they studied had individual, unique markings. This synergy was a momentous turning point in the study of whales.<\/p>\n
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The conference star was Roger Payne. In the late 1960s, Payne and Scott McVay had discovered humpback whale songs and, in 1971, published their findings in Science. <\/em>Around the same time, Payne\u2019s record album \u201cSongs of the Humpback Whale\u201d made the Billboard<\/em> 200 chart and stayed there for eight weeks. It became the best-selling natural history record of all time. In the midst of his work on humpback songs, in 1970, Payne moved with his wife Katy and young children to \u201cWhale Camp,\u201d on the cliffs of Patagonia, in southern Argentina, to live among southern right whales, which were beginning their long recovery from intensive whaling.<\/p>\n At the conference, Payne talked about his right whales, played whale recordings, and showed films of his family adventures. He described how, after hours of observation, he realized that he could use the white markings on the head of a right whale to tell individuals apart. Payne and his team began taking aerial photographs from a small plane, capturing on film what turned out to be distinctive patterns of callosities\u2014the characteristic rough, white patches of skin, unique to right whales.<\/p>\n By 1973, Payne and his team had started using photographs to match whales seen in previous years. One of the first southern right whales to be photo-IDed, however, was matched using a white belly patch not a callosity. In 1970, Payne had photographed a whale swimming belly-up, accompanied by a calf. The adult whale would come to be known as Troff. The calf disappeared but a few years later, researcher Eleanor \u201cEllie\u201d Dorsey, then working with Payne in Patagonia, matched a photo of a whale\u2019s belly markings to that first 1970 photo\u2014Troff was back at Whale Camp and she had a new calf in tow. Payne and his colleagues were beginning to see the rich potential of photo-ID.<\/p>\n Southern right whales in Patagonia were some of the first whales to be photo-identified. Photo by Paul Souders\/Corbis<\/p><\/div>\n Also at the Indiana conference, Steven Katona, from College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, Maine, talked about the humpback whale tails he\u2019d been photographing in the Gulf of Maine since about 1970. (Humpbacks are the easiest of all whales to identify individually because they surface three or four times, allowing the boat and photographer to get into position. When they dive, the whales flip their tail flukes high out of the water, revealing the telltale white-and-black pigmentation patterns on the underside.) A year after the conference, Scott Kraus, then a College of the Atlantic student working with Katona, compiled the first basic humpback tail fluke catalog. That became the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog, which is still curated by College of the Atlantic and today includes photos of more than 8,000 different humpback whales.<\/p>\n The idea of photo-identifying whales began to coalesce around the Indiana University conference, yet individual identification of animals by scientists was not new. In the 1930s, ethologist Konrad Lorenz recognized individual greylag geese through natural markings and behavior in his studies of imprinting. And when students of Lorenz, and his colleague Nikolaas Tinbergen who founded Oxford University\u2019s animal behavior department, took to the savannas of Africa, individual identification was adopted for studies of zebras, giraffes, elephants, and lions. The insights of Jane Goodall into chimpanzee behavior depended in part on her ability to recognize individual animals from their natural markings.<\/p>\n Why did it take so long for photo-ID to be tried with whales? Partly it was the difficulty of working with fast-moving animals that spent most of their time underwater, and appeared at the surface only briefly. Also, the centuries of heavy whaling in every ocean\u2014which only began to wind down in the late 1960s\u2014had removed nearshore populations.<\/p>\n As the whales started returning to the coasts in the early 1970s, researchers equipped with relatively inexpensive, hand-held single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras, came out to meet them. Many of these researchers were 1960s idealists living in a time of cultural upheaval when questions were being asked that had few answers, when authority and the ways of doing things were being challenged, and when a flagrant disregard for the environment symbolized by the near-obliteration of whales became a rallying point. Many began to consider the intelligence of whales and dolphins and they looked to the study of wild whales for answers.<\/p>\n Photo-ID became the single-minded obsession of many researchers. Little did we realize the promise that it held to provide whales with a backstory, a personal narrative that could give context to their lives. Still, photographing one whale at a time was never going to be a quick way to learn about marine species that spend most of their time underwater and cover vast distances. The success of the tool would rely on the accretion of data over many years and cooperation among researchers as far flung as the whales.<\/p>\n Early evidence of the power of whale photo-ID came in 1979 when Jim Darling, who studied Hawaiian humpback whales as well as Pacific grays, took a stack of photos to Alaska. Darling wanted to compare his Hawaiian humpback images to those taken by researcher Charles Jurasz on the whales\u2019 Southeast Alaskan feeding grounds. At that time, scientists assumed humpbacks from Hawaii were migrating to the Aleutian Islands, 2,400 kilometers west of Southeast Alaska, to feed.<\/p>\n Darling played host to the landmark slide show in his hotel room in Juneau. The first slide Jurasz projected on the wall looked familiar to Darling. He rifled through his prints and pulled out one that appeared to match. \u201cWell it was so close,\u201d he says, \u201cwe couldn\u2019t believe it. But the photo was a little fuzzy, so we didn\u2019t count that one.\u201d The third slide, however, was a definite match: it was the first time photographs were used to help understand the migration routes of humpbacks in the Pacific.<\/p>\n Whale researcher Jim Darling prepares to photograph the identifying features of humpback whales in Southeast Alaska. Photo by Flip Nicklin<\/p><\/div>\n Darling was astonished to find many more matches between Hawaii and Southeast Alaska. Weeks later, he compared photographs with Katy Payne who had spent the winter recording songs in Mexico. He found some of his Hawaiian humpbacks in her photo-ID collection. These assorted slides and black-and-white photographs showed that humpbacks were not only traveling great distances, but that certain humpbacks were changing their breeding grounds from year to year, switching between Mexico and Hawaii.<\/p>\n The collaborations continued and through subsequent matches of photo-ID shots, researchers around the world identified many other whale migration paths and unpredictable movements. For instance, Troff, the southern right whale first photo-IDed by Payne, revealed a surprising change of habitat. Researchers encountered the young mother in Golfo San Jos\u00e9, Patagonia, Argentina, over seven seasons between 1970 and 1981, with three separate calves. But then, in 1988, she swam to southern Brazil, 3,000 kilometers farther north and raised a calf there. She returned to Brazil in 1994, but by 2004 was back in Golfo San Jos\u00e9.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re following the lives of known southern right whale individuals in the South Atlantic extending even to Antarctic waters,\u201d says Mariano Sironi, scientific director of the Instituto de Conservaci\u00f3n de Ballenas in Argentina. This information helps determine the whales\u2019 biological and conservation needs. Sironi and other Argentine biologists, along with southern right whale researcher Vicky Rowntree and the group Ocean Alliance, based in Massachusetts, are continuing Roger and Katy Payne\u2019s work in Patagonia. Through photo-ID, we know that females have their first calf at age nine and have one calf every three years on average, Sironi says. \u201cAnd thanks to Troff and other whales, we now know that conservation strategies to protect right whales in the South Atlantic can only be effective if we include large oceanic areas that extend from southern Brazil to the Antarctic.\u201d<\/p>\n As the revelations from photo-ID spread to every ocean, scientists were surprised to find unexpected migration events, such as the South Pacific humpback whales that cross the equator to breed. The drive to get inside whale societies\u2014not just to identify the individuals, but to understand how families and other groupings worked\u2014became the holy grail for those engaged in long-term studies of toothed whales and dolphins, and particularly of killer whales.<\/p>\n<\/a>
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