Whale Conservation: Whale Center of New England

March 30, 2001

75 Humpbacks Are Christened At Conference

By Barbara Taormina, Gloucester Daily Times staff

Whale Naming Party, 2001 ESSEX -- Almost everyone has heard of Moby Dick, the great white star of Herman Melville's 19th century novel about the New Bedford whaling industry. As far as name recognition goes, Moby Dick is the cetacean to beat.

But last weekend, whale watchers, scientists and conservationists gathered at the Essex Conference Center for a special meeting to name 75 humpback whales.

Pez, Pixar and Hanbanero are just three of the newly named whales that may someday be as familiar as Moby.

"The big thing about naming whales is whale watching," said Mason Weinrich, executive director and chief scientist at the Gloucester-based Whale Center of New England, the organization that hosted the conference.

"It's a way of giving people who don't work with whales a way to relate to the animals. A name creates a bridge for people or a way to establish a relationship with that whale."

And naming whales is fun -- at least for the first couple of hours of an all-day conference.

To christen each whale, the conference participants studied photographs of the animals' flukes, or tail fins, which are marked with unique black and white shapes and spots.

"The marks are often described as a fingerprint but I think a better description is a face," said Weinrich. "The flukes really are that different and distinct."

Within the pattern or design on the whale's tail, scientists find objects or ideas that suggest or inspire individual names.

"The best way to think of it is as a whole bunch of ink blots," said Weinrich, who has helped name 1,300 other humpbacks over the past 25 years.

And that is actually one of the problems.

"We have so many named whales coming into this," said Weinrich. "The obvious names were taken 10 or 15 years ago."

To complicate matters, whales cannot be given human names or names that contain any type of gender bias.

"As a scientist, you try to be as objective as possible. If you named something after a gender, you would have that bias," explained Weinrich. "And a lot of times, we just don't know the sex."

But whatever the whales' names lack in gender, they make up in originality and imagination.

Allison Glass, the curator of the whale center's humpback catalog, was particularly pleased with her contribution of Pixar.

She chose the name after noticing one humpback had a mark that clearly resembled a desk lamp -- the logo for the Pixar film company the produced the animated films "A Bug's Life" and "Toy Story."

"I kind of thought desk lamp was a boring name so I picked Pixar," laughed Glass.

Pez was an obvious choice after another staff member at the whale center spotted a mark that looked like an open Pez candy dispenser.

Fourteen was named after several people noticed the number seemed scrawled on one whale's tail. And although it was an easy choice, there was some debate between Fourteen and Catorce because, as Weinrich put it, the Spanish sounds better.

"Sometime you have the perfect name and nobody else sees it," said Glass.

People do bring their own associations to the task of naming, which was probably the case with a whale named Cardhu.

"It's a Gaelic word for 'black rock'," explained Weinrich. "It's also the name of a very good, single-malt scotch."

Now that the animals are named, tour operators will be able to introduce the animals to the thousands of people who venture out on the water every summer to see the whales. With a name begins a distinct history or biography of each animal.

And that information is particularly useful to scientists like Weinrich who are keeping careful watch over the endangered population of North Atlantic humpback whales.

Although the humpback population has been growing at a rate of about 6 percent annually, there are still only about 1,000 animals regularly seen off the New England coast.

With names, scientists can track births, migrations, growth rates and some of the problems whales encounter during their life spans.

Fishing gear entanglements, ship strikes and attacks by packs of killer whales are the greatest threats to humpbacks.

The names are a starting point for conservation groups working to protect and preserve the humpbacks.

"The names give researchers a common frame of reference," said Weinrich. "It ensures that everyone working with these animals is on the same page."

Conservation Articles

Gloucester Daily Times: May 13, 2003;    Gloucester Daily Times: October 18, 2002;     Gloucester Daily Times: October 17, 2002
Gloucester Daily Times: April 2001;    Gloucester Daily Times: March 2001;    Gloucester Daily Times: January 2001;
Offshore Magazine: January 2000;    Boston Globe: Sept. 1999;    Boston Globe: January 1999