Above are Nicole Reed from Bar Harbour, Maine who is a marine bilogist, volunteer with Allied Whale and whale researcher, Camilla Stringer, and Than Sr and Than Jr Butterfield on their boat Emerald Spray as we set off on a bumpy but productive day.

Below are the five new fluke ids we obtained today on Sally Tuckers and Challenger Banks. Each of the whales had orca bite marks on the flukes or dorsal fin probably incurred when they were calves, somewhere between Bermuda and their northern feeding grounds. The right hand images show close-ups of some of the bite marks. About one in three North Atlantic humpback whales have these scars, a reflection of how deadly the orcas (aka killer whales, even though they are dolphins) can be to any weak or unprotected calf. It also lends credence to my theory that the humpbacks are aggregating on the mid-ocean seamounts such as Bermuda to assemble into sizeable gams (schools) of around ten animals.