Humpbacks in the southern hemisphere commonly have a white or grey underside which can extend onto their sides. The top of the pectoral fin is generally black on top and white underneath.
Humpbacks in the northern hemisphere are predominantly black, but have varying degrees of white on the throat, belly, pectoral fins, and flukes.
The top of their pectorals tend to be white.
Just like their body pigmentation, southern hemisphere humpback whales have large areas of white on their tail flukes.
The Australian East Coast population often have completely or mostly white on their tail flukes.
The darker tail flukes with less white are more common in northern hemisphere.
The black and white patterns on humpback whale flukes are unique to each whale, so individuals can be identified by photos of underside of the flukes. Photos can be uploaded to the HappyWhale data base. Since the 1970s scientists have used this as a tool, visually matching each whale in catalogs of thousands of individuals, to track individuals in migrations across oceans and to monitor populations. At present over 120,000 individuals have been identified.
Anyone can contribute to citizen science by taking a photo of a whale fluke and submitting it to Happywhale.com
Images and data are shared with scientific organizations engaged in photo ID studies. Happywhale will attempt to identify any individuals in your photos now using artificial intelligence-based automated image recognition.
Happywhale will notify you of what they find, either finding a match, or if they do not find a match, they will determine your whale to be new to science, add an ID, and look for your whale in all future sightings.
Contributed by Kellie Leonard, Master Reef Guide/Whales of the Whitsundays.
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