NamedHumpbacks

The whale that made naming whales possible — a white crust of scarring on her dorsal fin, bright as spilled salt on a wet deck.

A whale-watch captain working Stellwagen Bank picked her out of the crowd in the mid-1970s by that fin alone, then found her again the next season, and the next. The realisation travelled fast: individuals could be followed across years without ever touching them. Salt became the reference animal for a catalogue that now runs to thousands of humpbacks in the Gulf of Maine.

She has returned to the same summer feeding grounds for five decades and brought more than a dozen calves with her, several of which appear later in this register. Her descendants are named on a theme wherever possible — a small courtesy the catalogue has kept up ever since.

A humpback who swam under the Golden Gate, kept going, and spent three weeks in a freshwater slough sixty miles inland.

In October 1985 he turned up in the Sacramento River Delta, wrong in every way a whale can be wrong: fresh water, shallow water, a dead-end channel. The effort to move him became a national broadcast — boats herding from behind, and finally a recording of humpbacks feeding played from a vessel heading downstream, which he followed to sea.

Five years later he beached in San Francisco Bay mudflats and was lifted clear in a cargo net, identified from his fluke photographs as the same animal. He has been logged since off the Farallon Islands, keeping to salt water.

A tagged whale in the South Pacific, given the least dignified name in the register by an overwhelming margin, and better known for it than any of the alternatives.

The tagging project that followed him ran an open vote on names in 2007. The shortlist was full of reverent options in several languages. The internet chose Mister Splashy Pants with roughly three-quarters of some 150,000 ballots, kept choosing it when the poll was extended, and the organisers — to their credit — honoured the result.

The joke did the work no press release had managed: the tag data, the migration route, and the hunt that season were suddenly being discussed by people who had never read a cetacean survey. The catalogue lists the name exactly as submitted.

A son of Salt, catalogued in his own right for the thing he does best: exhaling a wall of bubbles and driving a shoal into it.

A feeding humpback will spiral upward beneath a school of herring or sand lance, releasing air in a ring so the bubbles form a curtain the fish will not cross. The whale then comes up through the middle of its own trap with its mouth open. Some individuals lead these nets, some hold station on the rim, and the roles are stable enough across seasons that researchers log them by name.

Colt learned the technique on Stellwagen Bank as a calf travelling with his mother, which is the ordinary way it is acquired — not instinct, but a habit passed down a family line and along a feeding ground.

A whale whose name is attached, in the record, to a set of rope scars and to the crew that cut them off her.

Humpbacks feed with their mouths open in water that is also full of fixed fishing gear, and the long flippers that give the species its scientific name — Megaptera, big wing — catch line easily. Most animals in the Gulf of Maine catalogue carry entanglement scarring somewhere. A proportion of them carry the gear itself until someone reaches them.

Nile was cut free with a knife on a pole from a small boat, then re-photographed in following seasons with the wounds closed into white lines. Those lines are now part of her identification. The catalogue treats scars as it treats pigment: a mark that tells one whale from another, whatever put it there.

A captive humpback in a Sausalito aquarium, written as the last male of his kind, and carried forward three centuries in a stolen ship to answer a signal nobody else could.

The premise is unusually literal about why names matter. A probe arrives in the 23rd century broadcasting humpback song; there are no humpbacks left to answer it; so a crew goes back to 1986 to fetch two, by name, from a tank. George is the male, described to visitors by a marine biologist who is about to lose both animals to open water.

The film was made while commercial whaling was still being argued over in public, and it closes on the whales answering. As a piece of advocacy it is unsubtle. It also put the word humpback in front of an audience that had never gone looking for it.

A humpback who takes a sea snail around the world and is then stranded on a beach, where the snail fetches help. Named nowhere in the text — and listed here because of it.

The book is in rhyming couplets and is read to a great many four-year-olds, which makes it, by circulation, one of the most widely encountered humpbacks anywhere. Its plot is a stranding response: a whale in the shallows on a falling tide, and a much smaller party raising an alarm in time.

The register keeps an entry for unnamed individuals when they are otherwise unmistakable, exactly as it does for field animals photographed once and never matched again. The convention is to list the designation, note the absence, and leave the line open.