Thank you very much. We actually don’t have many fluke photos, as we’ve found concentrating on flukes to be a relatively inefficient way of ID-ing the southern hemisphere humpbacks in Vava’u. Many of them have such distinctive body markings that we have a greater success rate ID-ing with the entire body. And the whales don’t always fluke-up when they dive. In fact, it’s only a minor proportion of the time that they do. With limited time and resources, we concentrate on the methodology that gives us the greatest amount of verifiable data while we’re there.

If we can keep this going for several more years, it’ll be interesting to see what trends develop.

Hope your skin-sample analysis is going well!