Whale family trees and social relationships! The remarkable case of humpback whale "Heather" CRC-13712
Here you see the family tree of the famous pioneering whale Heather, one of the early explorers of the Salish Sea as humpback whales rediscovered and reestablished populations in these waters where they’d been hunted out completely in the first decade of the 20th century. Last year Heather’s 2006 calf Split Fluke and Split Fluke's 2017 calf Valiant were seen traveling with each other on multiple occasions, one of just a few documented encounters of a mom with her offspring from previous years.
Many of our research collaborators have been tracking relationships and associations between individual whales, in some cases for decades and as in the case of Heather, since the founding of local populations. This project, once fully funded, will enable a robust and collaboratively accessible way to track, visualize and analyze these relationships.
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