Exciting news
We have had a little break in the weather and were able to go out whale watching two days in a row, February 4th and 5th. Both days we saw a pod of dolphins and a mother and calf humpback pair. The absolute most exciting part for us as researchers is that we were able to identify the mother as Pinball. Pinball is the daughter of one of our adoptable whales, Liner. Liner gave birth to Pinball in 1989 and in her 19 years of life Pinball has had 5 calves, including this years calf. It is always wonderful to see whales you know, but even more wonderful to see them with their babies and know that the population is continuing to grow. Of course seeing calves is great because they are cute and little and sometime doing really fun things. For example, Pinball’s calf breached a few times on the 4th and then tail breached and flipper slapped on the 5th. 
But just the fact that this new calf exists is the best part from a population standpoint because humpbacks are endangered; so reproducing females like Pinball, who keep adding to the population, are critical.
Also really important is that Pinball has a safe place to give birth and to nurse her calf and it seems that she might like it here in the Turks and Caicos. Once we figured out that the mother was indeed Pinball from the tail fluke, I went back and exmined the dorsal fins of our other mother and calf sightings from this season. From the dorsal fins, I was able to figure out that we saw Pinball and her calf on January 25th as well. In fact the photos in the January 25th blog are of Pinball and her calf too. So she has been in these waters with her new baby for more then a few days. All very exciting.
But from a research perspective our story gets better because we saw Pinball here last year. She was by herself, in that she did not have a calf with her last year (usually humpbacks don’t have calves in consecutive years as it is incrediably hard on the body). But there were five to six other adult humpbacks in the same area as Pinball last year when we saw her off Salt Cay.
So Pinball might just use the waters around Salt Cay as her breeding and calving grounds. Clearly, we need to do more research before being able to say conclusively, but what we have found so far is pretty exciting.
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But kudos to the people who did their best to save him.