By Andrea Hargraves 
The humpback's tail is as unique as a fingerprint. The lobes, or flippers, at the end of the tail have scalloped edges that vary from whale to whale; the undersides have distinctive black and white patterns that distinguish the individual for life.
When marine mammal researcher Adam A. Buck of the University of Hawaii at Hilo was photographing whales in Frederick Sound, a passage between archipelagos in Alaska, in July of this year, he immediately recognized the wolves from an old friend.
The tail — mostly black, with white spots near the tip — belongs to a whale nicknamed Old Timer. The male was first seen in 1972 and is now at least 53 years old, making him “the oldest known humpback whale in the world,” according to Buck, who is also co-founder and president of the Society for the Study of the World. Dolphin Institute.
Humpback whale numbers, which had previously been severely reduced by commercial hunting, have recovered in recent decades, but the animals remain threatened by ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear and climate change.
Buck was worried about his old friend. The last time he saw the whale was in 2015, in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave that lasted for years. Dozens of seabirds and marine mammals, including humpback whales, had died.
But, nine years later, he saw with his own eyes that the old timer had survived.
“It was a relief to realize that it wasn’t just the older whales that were dying,” Buck said. “Some of them were holding on.”
It is possible that it lived long enough to be able to adapt when certain food resources were limited.
Historically, tracking whales’ whereabouts has been a difficult task: Scientists use their eyes to compare new images of tail fins with old ones. But future studies of Old Timer and other humpbacks of all ages should be accelerated by AI. Buck hopes it will help him learn how and why some whales are able to survive harsh conditions.
Several populations of humpback whales live in the North Pacific. Old Timer is part of a population that spends the winter breeding in the waters around Hawaii and the summer in southeastern Alaska, feeding on fish and krill. These animals have been the subject of ongoing scientific study that began in 1976 when marine mammal researcher Louis Herman began photographing the whales and their distinctive fins.
Herman conducted annual surveys, amassing a massive collection of tail images that allowed scientists to follow individual whales throughout their lives. These tail images, now numbering more than 30,000, have provided new information about whales’ lives, from their migration patterns to their social behaviors.
“It's one of the longest-running scientific studies of humpback whales in the world,” said Buck, one of Herman's former students and colleagues and now the project's leader.
The study enters the era of machine learning with the help of the electronic platform. happy whalewhich collects images of whale tails taken by scientists and others around the world.
The database contains nearly 1.1 million images of more than 100,000 humpbacks, according to Ted Cheeseman, a co-founder of Happywhale and a PhD student at Southern Cross University in Australia.
AI-Powered Image Matching Algorithms Help identify whales automatically In the uploaded images, help scientists in the field or others who need to search for previous sightings of a particular animal.
“Happywhale has revolutionized our industry and made collaboration at scale possible,” said Buck.
Earlier this year, Cheeseman, Buck, and dozens of other researchers used Happywhale's image recognition tool Estimating the abundance of humpback whales in the Pacific Ocean North from 2002 to 2021. Initially, the whale population grew rapidly, reaching about 33,500 whales in 2012.
But then it dropped dramatically. This population decline coincided with a severe marine heatwave, when the Old Timer was last observed. It lasted from 2014 to 2016 and led to a significant decline in fish and krill supplies.
“There’s a lot we want to learn about this event, but this much is clear: warmer waters mean less food is available overall, and what is available is more dispersed and deeper,” Cheeseman said in an email.
Humpback whale numbers in Hawaii have been particularly hard hit, declining 34% from 2013 to 2021. Although there were a handful of Old Timer sightings reported after 2015, Buck was excited to finally lay eyes on the whale in person. But that excitement soon gave way to curiosity: Why had his old friend survived, while so many others had perished?
Now, Buck hopes to dive deeper with Happywhale’s help. He plans to investigate how humpback whales survive tough years and whether there are any discernible patterns. Could Old Timer’s age be an advantage?
“It probably lived long enough to be able to adapt when certain food resources were limited,” Buck said.
The idea remains speculative, and it's not yet clear whether Old Timer is the exception or the rule. “How many whales like him would have been able to survive this devastation of marine resources?” the researcher asks.