An award-winning local whale researcher has reported identifying a record number of humpback whales during this year’s migration season.

Andrew Stevenson, who is the founder of the Whales Bermuda research project, spotted hundreds of individual humpback whales.

He wrote on a post on social media: “This season we identified a new record of over 300 individual humpback whales in Bermuda waters.

“That’s double the total number that scientists had achieved over the previous 40 years before I started identifying humpbacks back in 2006.

“About a third of them we have identified in previous years. Our Bermuda catalogue now includes 2,377 individual humpback whales. Many of these have been matched to the breeding grounds down in the Caribbean and plenty more to the feeding grounds from New York and as far north as Russia.

“For a recent example of a match, a humpback whale named Bandit was identified in an encounter in July 2022 in New York, United States. We encountered this whale in my first year of identifying whales.”

He said there were only eight that year in Bermuda.

Mr Stevenson has shared his fluke IDs with Allied Whale, College of the Atlantic, which has resulted in several poster presentations at the Society for Marine Mammology biennial conferences.

He also has an ongoing collaboration with University of Edinburgh postgraduate students, whose dissertations based on Whales Bermuda data sets have been published in scientific journals.

Mr Stevenson said in his post that he needed a single-lens reflex and long lens for the photo identification of humpback whales.

He added: “The underside of the tail has a unique black and white pattern we can use to identify each animal and the identifying of bottlenose dolphins and Cuvier beaked whales.”

• For more information about Whales Bermuda or to contact Andrew Stevenson, visitwww.whalesbermuda.com