End of season 2012, part 1

Happy New Year!
While we are still dealing with the data from 2012, we have also started to prepare the 2013 season. 2012 was an over- average season in the long-term, but we have seen less animals in Mingan compared to the last 7 -8 years. The good news is that there were more blue whales, we even saw 5 in Mingan. It was also the year of the 22nd blue whale calf sighted by DFO off Cape Breton. The cow showed up in Mingan alone late the summer, after weaning the calf.

We have now moved to over 800 humpback whales in the catalog, altogether we added 17 new animals. In 2012, we were missing about 30 regular animals, like Circe, Ebene, Darkstar, Winston and others. Did we miss them due to the frequent bad weather or did they just not come this year? In contrast we did see quite a few Gulf of Maine humpback whales.

With fin whales we will probably end up with around 90 ID's for 2012, while with blue whales we cannot tell yet since we are still receiving data from other sources.
Once again we would like to thank all of our collaborators for all the contributions to the catalogs and we are looking forward to working with you in 2013.
The MICS-winter-team

H800, new in 2012