Interact with all different kinds of animals. Watch the fish in the North Rock exhibit or the fabulous birds at the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo. Go horseback riding along the dunes on the south shore. Swim with the Dolphins or just watch them perform at Dolphin Quest in Dockyard! Devil's Hole Aquarium is the oldest and all natural aquarium featuring lots of fish and turtles. Kids love these attractions...and so do big kids!

The Humpbacks of Bermuda

Andrew Stephenson has been working on this environmental education project over the last two plus years. He has given many illustrated public lectures at BUEI and the Aquarium, at schools, clubs and any venue that asks him to speak about Bermuda's marine environment numbering in the thousands of adults and schoolchildren.

Bermuda is unique in the world as a platform in the middle of the ocean to provide a window into the migratory lives of humpback whales. One unexpected result of the amount of time that he has spent on the water looking for and filming whales underwater is the research component. Marine scientists around the world have shown an active interest in  the observations and hypotheses. Andrew has been invited to co-author two poster presentations at a major marine mammal conference in October with some of these scientists.

You can see his work on the humpback whales, www.whalesbermuda.com,   which has almost 90,000 hits in just over a year with an additional 100,000 plus hits on the videos on YouTube.

An unexpected outcome of my film is the scientific data obtained. The underside of the humpback whales fluke has a pattern that is unique to that whale, much like our fingerprints are unique to us. Fluke ids are an important component of studying the migratory behaviour of humpbacks. The total inventory of whale flukes identified in Bermuda from 1968 to 2006 is only 140 or on average 3 1/2 flukes per year. In the three years of this project, he has obtained over 300 individual fluke ids, 200 of these this year alone. Many of the matches made are matched to whales photographed and id'ed over thirty years ago in Canada, the Gulf of Maine or the Caribbean. Using these fluke ids and comparing them with the 7,000 whales in the North Atlantic humpback whale catalogue in the United States, some very interesting patterns have come to light.