BLOG

Our team has been conducting humpback whale photo ID since 2015, and contributes our images to a very helpful website called Happy Whale. It allows contributors to upload their photos of whales to be compared against other contributor images using an image recognition algorithm. At the time of writing, there are 2,318 images from 366 individual humpback whales and sperm whales in the HDR catalog. We have just received a couple very cool updates on two of our previously sighted humpback whales.

HDRVAMn157  was first seen by our team in February 2019, which, along with another sighting in our area by Rudee Tours, had been the only sighting of this individual in the Happy Whale database. This individual has now been seen down in the British Virgin Islands on 22 Apr 2026 – which is the first match our Virginia catalog has to that area. It was seen by a group called Beyond the Reef, a nonprofit that recently started doing whale research. This is an interesting match from our feeding and migratory area to a humpback whale breeding ground. 

HDRVAMn021 (“Pisa”) is a humpback whale that our team has seen in our area on 16 occasions over 7 field seasons. This whale was first seen on January 15, 2015, and the most recent sighting was December 18, 2025. Rudee Tours/Virginia Aquarium first saw this whale on January 07, 2012 in Virginia, and Gotham Whale in New York has a sighting history as well in Happywhale. Up until now, we’ve not been able to determine a gender for this whale. Recent updates to Happy Whale show that this individual was seen two months after our sighting on 19 Feb 2026 in Turks and Caicos…but she wasn't alone! She was sighted with a calf, so now we can presume female, and know that she was pregnant when we had seen her! We have, however, never been able to get close enough to tag this animal.

Humpback whale named "Pisa"