While whale watching with 39 guests on Saturday, crew members with Hawaiian Adventures Kona sited a momma, baby and male escort near Kiholo Bay.

With the app Happywhale, Capt. Andrew Aggergaard and naturalist Olivia Miller were thrilled to be able to identify the two adults by photographing their flukes and letting the app’s artificial intelligence match them to those in its global digital database of more than 70,000 whales.

Every humpback whale has unique markings on the underside of their flukes, and this mom was matched to scientific ID “HW-MN0441379” and her male companion to scientific ID is “HW-MN0441807.” The app also provided information that the female was sighted in Hawai‘i in 2021, also with a calf.

Ed Lyman, natural resource specialist with Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Marine Sanctuary, said tour companies like Hawaiian Adventures Kona are critical in helping scientists build the database of humpback whale flukes.

“For whale research, it’s foundational,” Lyman said. “If you can follow an animal over time and space you can get migration patterns, habitat usage and even population estimates.”

While identifying individual whales has been done since the 1970s, Lyman said this app’s artificial intelligence cuts down hours of work, often done before by two or three interns who would sit at two computer screens and compare flukes one-by-one with those in a database.

With Happywhale, the humpback now is identified almost instantly with the ever-evolving technology.

The app was created in 2015, motivated by co-founder Ted Cheeseman’s decades of expedition to Antarctica and the island of South Georgia, where 20th century whaling left oceans almost empty of the majestic creatures. But in 2011, this began to change and he began to individually identify whales, according to Happywhale’s website.

The app is meant to engage anyone interested in marine mammals and serve the research community with powerful collaborative tools.

So far, 729,203 photos of whales from around the world have been submitted to the app, with 270,380 identified encounters and 104,834 individual whales identified, according to Happywhale.

The Maui-based Pacific Whale Foundation is by far the app’s all-time top contributor, with 24,797 encounters.