Gale McCollough is a school teacher who lives near the small seaside town of Hancock, Maine. From that humble location, she recently made an extraordinary discovery.
Using the photo-sharing site Flickr and a personal history of studying whale photos, she identified a picture, taken in 2001 by tourist Freddy Johansen in Madagascar, of an Antarctic humpback known to scientists as number 1363. Two years earlier, researchers had spotted 1363, a female, swimming alongside another whale in Brazil. Brazil to Madagascar. That’s a distance of 6,000 miles, nearly double any documented migration by a humpback.
Since the late 1970s the Allied Whale research group at the College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor has built a catalogue of whale photos. McCollough scoured the catalogue and developed an expertise for identifying humpbacks based on their distinct shape, color and markings.
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More recently McCollough searched for “humpback” on Flickr and unlocked an embarrassment of riches. She consolidated the pics into a group, and then in 2009, caught sight of number 1363 in the Johansen photo. The discovery led to her co-authoring a paper published earlier this month in Biology Letters, and earning her the esteemed title of citizen scientist. In the process, she changed our understanding of the humpback whale.
—Christie Nicholson
