

One of our goals from the start of this project was to officially name and sponsor a whale. We were able to achieve this goal much quicker than anticipated by collaborating with and donating to the Oceanic Society. Keiko the whale is listed and tracked on a website called Happy whales, an organization that "engages citizen scientists to identify individual marine mammals, for fun and for science."
CRC-18897, known as Keiko, is a relatively new whale to science. Keiko was first identified in April 2019 when it was photographed in Monterey Bay. Keiko has since been spotted twice, once in waters off of Mendocino County, Ca by researchers from Cascadia Research Collective (September 2020), and once by Oceanic Society not far from San Francisco during a whale watching trip on October 16, 2021. Keiko has distinctive circular markings on its flukes, scars from barnacles that have been shed, that will help researchers to identity Keiko in the future.