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Background: One of our best research tools is the
ability to identify individuals through natural markings. If
we can identify and track individual whales, we can learn a lot
about whale behavior, life history, reproduction, and migration
patterns. Researchers identify humpback
whales primarily by the markings on their tail, or fluke. A
humpback's tail can range from all black to all white, or somewhere
in between. The marking is just like our fingerprint - it's
different for every whale. While markings occasionally change
throughout a whale's life, they are relatively stable, giving us a
great way to identify whales without doing invasive research such as
attaching tags to them!
Below are some whale flukes you can use in an
activity (Note: it may take a few minutes to download on a slow
modem).
Activity ideas:
- Have students pretend they are researchers and
figure out how they would tell one whale from another, and arrange
the photos into a "catalog" that makes sense to them.
- To make it easier for us to remember whales, we
give them names. The names are given each year at a Whale
Naming Workshop where all area researchers get together and vote on
names. Print out the tails and vote on your own names!
Then you can tell the students the whales' "real" names and they can
try to figure out why they got those names.
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