Everyone who sails south to Antarctica is likely to have seeing whales pretty high on their wish list. It’s one of the world’s great whale watching destinations, especially once the calendar rolls around into the new year and the great whales start to congregate to feast on krill during the long days of the Antarctic summer. But it’s also possible to put your whale watching to the service of science, thanks to the Happy Whale citizen science programme.
Last January I headed south of Swoop’s Crossing the Antarctic Circle trip, sailing on the Sylvia Earle. As befits a cruise vessel named after the celebrated marine biologist and oceanographer, the Sylvia Earle makes a big thing about its on-board citizen science programme. These allow passengers to get involved in collecting data or samples for credited research programmes in places where its otherwise tricky or prohibitively expensive for scientists to visit.
There are a variety of different projects to get involved in, from sampling phytoplankton and carrying out seabird surveys. All fascinating of course, but I’ll confess that I was interested in something a little larger. I wanted to spot whales.
Looking for humpback whales
I was sailing in January, nearing the peak of whale watching season. We didn’t have too long to spot our first whales either. On our first day south of the Antarctic Circle, somewhere around Prospect Point, our expedition leader’s evening brief had to be abandoned when the ship’s tannoy announced that several humpback whales had been spotted off the bow.
The ship was already stationary and we were entranced when four humpback whales approached us and idly splashed around the ship for nearly 40 minutes before continuing on their way. As first whale sightings go, it was pretty magical. It was all our expedition leader Howard could do to suggest that we all reconvene in the ship’s bar later to talk about the experience and tell us that if anyone got a good photo of the whales’ flukes, we should upload them to the Happy Whale website when we had a calmer moment.
These whales all looked pretty happy as far as we could see, but it was a useful reminder about one of the quieter but more impressive citizen science projects that anyone can get involved with on an Antarctic cruise.
The power of Happy Whale comes from the fact that the only tool needed to participate is the one thing that any passenger on a ship is already going to be carrying: a camera. By uploading a photo of your whale, you can add to a global crowd-sourced database collating sightings from around the world. This resource is used by whale researchers worldwide, as well as having a powerful effect on the way that expedition cruise ships operate around the Antarctic Peninsula to improve whale conservation.
The happiest whales you’ll find on this database are humpback whales like those we had just seen. Humpbacks love to show off their tail flukes when they dive. Luckily for researchers and citizen scientists alike, each tail fluke is as individual as a fingerprint. If you can recognise a humpback’s flukes, you can in theory track that whale if it’s sighted anywhere else in the world, as it migrates between its Antarctic summer feeding grounds and its tropical breeding grounds. A simple fluke potentially offers powerful insights into humpback behaviour.
Of course, first you need your photo. I didn’t take any good shots in that first sighting – I was happy enough just to witness the encounter. But as the trip went on and we saw more and more whales, I knew that there were surely some flukes out there with my name on them.
Tracking whale migrations
At Swoop, we know first-hand just what an amazing tool Happy Whale is. In 2017, my former colleague Brandon took a photo of a humpback whale in the Gerlache Strait in the Antarctic Peninsula. There was no match for any recorded whales when he uploaded his image to the database, but nearly nine months later he received an email saying that his whale had been spotted again. It wasn’t in Antarctica though; it had been photographed off the Pacific coast of Nicaragua!
The whale (given the less than poetic name of HW-MN1300655) had swum somewhere between 8,700 and 10,000 kilometres on its migration to these tropical waters. Just as incredibly, the database quickly established that this was the first recorded report of a Southern hemisphere humpback whale off Nicaragua’s Pacific coast. A quick photo taken on an Antarctic cruise had revealed a previously unknown migratory pattern of Southern Hemisphere humpback whales.
I really needed to get that shot.
We were blessed on this trip with some extraordinary sightings. A few days later we saw a pod of whales being harassed by orcas, with adult whales surrounding a calf trying to protect it from attack. The hunt (which ended unsuccessfully) went on for around 20 minutes and was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. We were jubilant that the calf had escaped unharmed, but it was a sharp reminder that life at the poles is one of struggle. Our onboard whale biologist later suggested that the orcas hadn’t actually been intent on a meal but might have been using the encounter to teach hunting technique to their own young.
A third encounter came out on the water when we were zodiac cruising. This time a single humpback was relieved that there were no orcas around by lazily swimming close to our boats. It was an incredibly intimate experience. We felt dwarfed by its presence and almost deafened by the great explosion of pressure that erupted every time it came up to breathe. The vapour from its lungs hung in the air and made our own astonished breaths taste of krill.
And I finally got my fluke photo, somewhere near Horseshoe Island. Reviewing my images for the best shot the ‘fingerprint’ was clear: a pattern of barnacles on the tip of the flukes and two brown smudges near the base of the tail. I was eager to find out where else it had been.
The power of algorithms
At the end of my trip, and waiting for the database to process my photo, I checked in with Ted Cheeseman, the marine biologist who had created Happy Whale and was one of the co-founders of the Polar Citizen Science Collective. He described the eureka moment he’d had back in 2004, which was the first time he’d taken a digital camera to Antarctica.
‘I photographed a whale just outside Deception Island in the Bransfield Strait. It had scars on its tail where it had been attacked by a killer whale. Four days later we went to [US Antarctic research base] Palmer Station along the peninsula and I walked into the men’s bathroom and there on the wall was a picture of the same whale off the Danco Coast.’
It had been known for decades that whales could be recognised by their flukes, but the addition of digital cameras added a new dimension– especially to someone like Cheeseman who grew up next to Silicon Valley and knew that image recognition could be automated.
Several years and algorithms later, by 2019 Happy Whale was able to recognise over 97% of potential matches of whale images. Whale biologists were quick to embrace it, with the result that in places like the Eastern North Pacific, from California up to Alaska, up to 90% of individual humpbacks have been identified, opening up new areas of research in the process. Cheeseman suggests that there are currently around 75,000 individual humpback whales on the Happy Whale database, out of a possible global population of 250,000. That’s nearly one in three humpback whales in the world.
Conservation effects
What’s particularly gratifying for passengers onboard Antarctic cruise ships is the contributions to Happy Whale have had a direct effect on the way that ships operate in the region. Data from whale sightings has helped identify locations and dates rich in whale activity around the Peninsula and South Shetland Islands. As a result, in 2019 members of the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO) unanimously reduced maximum cruising speeds in these areas to mitigate the possible risk of ship strikes. At the start of the 2023 cruising season, these geofenced areas have been further extended, with all ships encouraged to collect more data to enable further protection for these whales.
And what of ‘my’ whale? You can look him or her up on Happy Whale under the name HW-MN1304516. It was first spotted three days before my sighting and then again just over a week later in the same area, no doubt eating krill by the tonne. But where is it now? I’m certainly keen to find out, and every now and then catch myself waiting for a happy ping in my inbox to tell me that it’s enjoying somewhere tropical.
Or maybe I’ll just have to keep my eyes trained during my next trip to Antarctica. It’s nice to imagine I’ll have some friendly flukes waiting there for me.
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You can upload your whale photos to Happy Whale or browse sightings on their website.
If you’d like to learn what citizen science programme you can get involved with on a polar cruise, Swoop Antarctica are the experts to talk to. See our blog series about projects our Antarctic specialists have taken part in or visit our website for more.
