The naturalist who gave almost every humpback in the North Pacific a fingerprint
Santa Cruz, California, US (platform is global; contributors in 100+ countries) · Ted Cheeseman, Ken Southerland
Published July 23, 2026
Ted Cheeseman built a website where anyone with a whale-tail photo can help identify individual whales, and it grew into the largest photographic record of any whale species on Earth.
The story
The person and the place
Ted Cheeseman, a lifelong naturalist in Santa Cruz, California, who led Antarctic expeditions for 30 years before turning to whale science.
The problem they cared about
Identifying one humpback from a photo of its tail could take a scientist more than an hour, so whole ocean populations went effectively uncounted.
The agency moment
In 2015 he co-founded Happywhale, where anyone (researchers, whale-watch crews, kayakers, tourists) can upload a photo of a whale's tail, an AI proposes a match from the unique markings, and a scientist confirms every one.
It became the largest photographic dataset ever assembled for any whale species, more than a million photos and roughly 30,000 individual whales. Its first big finding, in Royal Society Open Science with more than 70 co-authors, showed the North Pacific humpback population fell about 7,000, roughly 20 percent, between 2012 and 2021, a marine-heat-wave signal no single researcher could have seen without everyone's photos.
"It's this five-meter banner, saying: This is my identity!" — Ted Cheeseman, Fast Company
Verified sources
Sources
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Sources last verified July 23, 2026.