Credit: © Pádraig Whooley, IWDGOn Jan 17, 2010, a humpback whale was observed and reported to the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG) Sighting Scheme by local IWDG members in inshore waters off Hook Head, County Wexford on the Irish south east coast. Over the following days a team from the IWDG successfully obtained a biopsy sample, under license from the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and secured photo-identification images. The biopsy confirmed this to be a male, and observations enabled the team to determine that this was a sub-adult specimen. The images of the ventral fluke and dorsal fin confirmed that this was a new humpback whale previously undocumented in Irish waters and so it was added to the Irish Humpback Whale Catalogue curated by the IWDG and allocated a unique ID of #HBIRL11.
As with all humpbacks photographed in Irish waters, images of this individual were shared with our partners at Allied Whale at the College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine, USA, who manage the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalogue (NAHWC) and have a database of 11,000+ individual humpbacks. At the time, this whale was determined to be a new individual for the wider North Atlantic catalogue and was allocated a unique ID of na04753.
On one particularly memorable day, we observed it from a distance breaching in the fog and approached it, not knowing that it would still be breaching by the time we were within camera range of it. We estimated that it breached on no less than 45 consecutive occasions, and it was our good fortune that we had a film crew from Crossing the Line Films who captured this spectacular display that later showcased on both national and international television on the RTE Wild Journeys series.
There have been no updates on this individual over the past 13 years, as he has not been recorded in Irish waters since. Of course, this doesn’t mean he hasn’t returned, as it is always possible that his movements could have gone undetected. But if he, like so many other “Irish” humpbacks, was a regular returnee to our shores, then we’d reasonably expect that he’d have been recorded at least occasionally.
Sea of Whales Adventures is a whale watching company based in Trinity Bay that tracks whale movements and photographs different species of whales around the Bonavista Peninsula on Newfoundland’s east coast. In addition to their work with humpback whales, this company also does photo-identification work with Orcas and sperm whales. Reg Kempen of Billericay, England is an integral part of Sea of Whales’ photo-identification program as he catalogues their data and submits it to the NAHWC at Allied Whale. The catalogue which he has created with the Princes now includes more than 1400 individual humpback whales.
Humpbacks typically exhibit high site fidelity to the feeding ground their mother brought them to as a calf. To our knowledge, this whale, na04753, was not sighted or photographed as a calf or in any year prior to 2018 in Newfoundland, despite lots of photo-identification effort in the region annually.
This is an important development, as it is so much more than a first humpback match between Ireland and Canada, it is also the first re-sighting between Ireland/British Isles and the western North Atlantic feeding grounds. The fact that this individual has been recorded in two known feeding areas, Newfoundland (summer) and Irish South coast (winter), is noteworthy and might call into question notions that this species remain faithful to one particular feeding area.