One of the things that I learned on this trip, was that humpback whale
tails are as unique as a human fingerprint. Whale researchers have
used this method of identification as a way of tracking the movements of
individual whales. There is a "Whale College" of researchers that
encourages anyone who manages to get a picture of a humpback tail, especially
in the Southern Hemisphere, to send in the picture so that it can be matched
against others in the catalogue. If a match is found, then a copy
of the migration pattern of that particular whale is sent to the person
that took the picture.
Using this method, some humpback whales have been tracked from Antarctica
to as far as the Caribbean!