Whales, dolphins, and porpoises of the western North Atlantic

Transcriber's Notes:
NOAA Technical Report NMFS CIRC-396
STEPHEN LEATHERWOOD, DAVID K. CALDWELL, and HOWARD E. WINN
with special assistance by William E. Schevill and Melba C. Caldwell
SEATTLE, WA AUGUST 1976
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Washington, D.C. 20402
Stock No. 003-020-00119-0 / Catalog No. C 55.13: NMFS CIRC-396
In March 1972, the Naval Undersea Center (NUC), San Diego, Calif. in cooperation with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), Tiburon, Calif. published a photographic field guide— The Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises of the Eastern North Pacific. A Guide to Their Identification in the Water , by S. Leatherwood, W.E. Evans, and D.W. Rice (NUC TP 282). This guide was designed to assist the layman in identifying the cetaceans he encountered in that area and was intended for use in two ongoing whale observer programs, NUC's Whale Watch and NMFS's Platforms of Opportunity. The rationale of these programs was that since oceanographers, commercial and sport fishermen, naval personnel, commercial seamen, pleasure boaters, and coastal aircraft pilots together canvas large areas of the oceans which scientists specializing in whales (cetologists) have time and funds to survey only occasionally, training those persons in species identification and asking them to report their sightings back to central data centers could help scientists more clearly understand distribution, migration, and seasonal variations in abundance of cetacean species. For such a program to work, a usable field guide is a requisite. Because the many publications on the whales, dolphins, and porpoises of this region were either too technical in content or too limited in geographical area or species covered to be of use in field identification, and because conventional scientific or taxonomic groupings of the animals are often not helpful in field identification, the photographic field guide took a different approach. Instead of being placed into their scientific groups, species were grouped together on the basis of similarities in appearance during the brief encounters typical at sea. Photographs of the animals in their natural environment, supplemented by drawings and descriptions or tables distinguishing the most similar species, formed the core of the guide.