To accomplish this photo-id research, Allied Whale has collaborated with over 300 North Atlantic researchers from the United States, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Bermuda and the West Indies. This international collaboration continues to strengthen Allied Whale's research efforts and provides additional information for the Catalog. This data base is constructed for your use in collaboration with Allied Whale at the College of the Atlantic Bar Harbor, Maine and MANY of the contributors to the catalogue who released the use of their data for this educational program. The WhaleNet Humpback Catalog contains a subset of the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog, primarily the humpbacks people are most likely to see if they go on a whale watch off the coast of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts or the Canadian Maritimes. When using the WhaleNet Humpback Catalog, keep in mind that this information is not the complete sighting history for each of these whales.
Contributors typically submit only one photograph and sighting data of each whale per year.
This allows the Catalog to roughly monitor the population over the long term. Research organizations which perform dedicated field research have more complete sighting histories for individual animals within their research areas. When Allied Whale receives a fluke photograph , it is compared with the photographs in the Catalog to see if that individual whale is already represented. Each new whale is assigned a Catalog number. Information on the date and location of each sighting is entered into the Catalog database, and the photograph is inserted into the Catalog.