SPLASH

Structure of Populations, Levels of Abundance, and Status of Humpbacks

SPLASH STATUS UPDATE, END OF 2007…

Data collection for the SPLASH project was completed in the spring of 2006, after five very successful seasons of effort. All photos and data collected during the five seasons of SPLASH have now been matched and reconciled. Final error-checking and data compilation is now underway. A report summarizing the results through the first four seasons of SPLASH is now available (Link to Progress Report) and results were presented at the Biennial Marine Mammal Conference in Cape Town (see below). All total, about 10,000 annual unique humpback whale identifications were made from across the North Pacific during the SPLASH project. Between-season matches will lower to this total unique catalog to about 8,000.

Additionally, about 5,000 tissue samples were collected. Most of these have been archived at the genetics lab at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, in San Diego, CA, and a preliminary analysis of the mtDNA has been conducted on about 2,000 of these and the results reported at the Biennial conference in South Africa in November 2007. Additional analyses including toxicology and studies of stable isotope and fatty acid composition have been conducted on subsets of the samples.