There’s a bit of a discrepancy between the official alpha-numeric designations and the way we say them casually. We’ve also tried to structure the lists below so it’s obvious who the mother is at a quick glance. There are a few instances where the naming structure doesn’t follow that pattern, generally if the relation wasn’t known when the whale was first discovered, but hopefully this explanation helps to understand the naming structure and decipher the relations between these individuals. T002C3’s first offspring will be named T002C3A. For example, T002’s offspring are T002A, T002B, and T002C. Our list of Southern Resident Killer Whales can be found here.Ī note about naming structures for Bigg’s Killer Whales - transients are numbered based on their matriline and birth order and the letters/numbers alternate as new generations are born. When we’re really stumped we dive into the behemoth 300+ page 2019 Towers et al publication, “Photo-identification Catalogue, Population Status, and Distribution of Bigg’s Killer Whales known from Coastal Waters of British Columbia, Canada.”, which is the definitive Bigg’s ID guide (of course, those Bigg’s are going through a baby boom, so there are a lot of little ones that have entered our waters since 2019). Membership grants you access to ID guides for both the Bigg’s Killer Whales and Southern Resident Killer Whales. We try to update this as new information is learned, and as we have our own encounters with them, but for a great ID guide be sure to become a member of the Center for Whale Research. Generally this involves countless google searches and tabs galore open in our browsers, so to save you (and us) from that search madness we decided to pull all of those resources together to create our own master list of the Bigg’s Killer Whales that travel through the wild waters of our beloved Puget Sound. Whenever we encounter a pod of killer whales in Puget Sound we scramble to identify them, remember their names (both their alpha-numeric designations and their fun, colloquial names) and connect all the dots of who the individuals are and how they’re all connected.
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