Michael Bigg, Canadian Who Pioneered Identification Of Northwest's Killer Whales
It's been 18 years since Michael Bigg photographed a group of killer whales in British Columbia's Johnstone Strait. One of the whales had a distinctively chewed-up dorsal fin.
``When we got back to the lab, we wondered if we could find and identify her again,'' Mr. Bigg recalled later.
Starting with that chance photograph, Mr. Bigg began work that has led to a remarkably detailed family tree for the killer whales of British Columbia and Washington waters.
Mr. Bigg named the whale A1 - although he referred to her affectionately as ``a 50-year-granny'' - designating her as the first positively identified whale and leading to a geneology for the pods of killer whales that reside in Pacific Northwest waters.
Mr. Bigg, 50, died of leukemia in a Duncan, B.C., hospital Thursday night.
``He laid the foundation for the whale-population studies, really pioneering work,'' said Birgit Kriete, research curator of the Whale Museum at Friday Harbor.
Mr. Bigg, who worked at the Pacific Biological Station near Nanaimo, B.C., began his work while aquariums were capturing killer whales. No one knew how many whales were in Pacific Northwest waters or what effect captures would have on the population. (There have been no captures since 1976.)
Mr. Bigg and other researchers worked out an identification system using variations in the dorsal fin and in the saddle patch, a pale area of skin just aft of the dorsal fin. Those characteristics identify a killer whale as surely as a fingerprint does a human.
He is survived by children, Michelle and Colin, and his parents in Duncan.
Mr. Bigg had recently summarized his work in two scientific papers for a volume on photo identification of whales to be published soon by the International Whaling Commission.
Peter Olesiuk, a co-worker at the Pacific Biological Station, said: ``The commission sent a special copy of the volume from Cambridge, England. Mike saw it the afternoon of the day he died. It was that close.''