Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
JUNEAU, Alaska - Sally Mizroch was pretty sure she'd seen whale No. 183 before. Its distinctive tail fluke was all white, with a few black Marilyn Monroe-type spots. She entered its features into her computer and got an instant match.
"I knew I knew that whale," the Seattle-based researcher said. "It looks as though I actually photographed that whale myself in 1991."
This week, researchers at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Auke Bay launched a Web site devoted to local humpbacks.
The site, designed by Suzie Teerlink and Justin Heard, is partly outreach and has lots of interesting trivia, such as how whales solve the challenge of nursing underwater (solution: thick, yogurt-like milk).
But the researchers also are looking for help from the whale-watching public.
Fluke identification can help researchers work out how many whales there are, how long they live, where they go and what they eat, among other questions. More pictures equals more data.
The Auke Bay researchers came to focusing on humpbacks in a roundabout way.
"We call it a herring project," said John Moran of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.
His team is investigating the mystery of why Lynn Canal herring stocks have never rebounded since their early 1980s slump, and they suspect that more whale predation may be partly why.
On July 31, Moran had just come in from a sunny day observing and photographing whales.
"A bunch of regulars," he reported. "I just need to figure out who's who."
One might think a fluke is a fluke, especially if one's main experience of whales is seeing a shadow disappear into the ocean.
But close-up photographs, shown on the Web site, show great variation in shape and color. They're arranged from whitest to blackest. White flukes scar black, and black ones scar white. Man-made tags are hard to put on and they fall off a lot. But scars stick around.
Luckily for Auke Bay scientists, Juneau's whales have been well-watched over the years.
It turns out whale No.183, the one Mizroch was examining, was first photographed, like so many others, by Chuck Jurasz in the 1970s. Juneau researchers Jurasz and Virginia Palmer pioneered identifying whales through photographs. A lot of the whales they saw are still seen today. The system they developed is used around the world.
Mizroch has spent more than 20 years matching humpback photos and developed a computer system for doing so.
That was direly needed, given the volume of photographs that have been taken over the years. Humpbacks can live for decades. They regularly travel between, say, Alaska and Hawaii. And there are a bunch of research groups, all of whom have their own catalogues. In the 1980s, those catalogues were all separate.
"It was a tool so we could integrate the catalogues and learn where the whales went," she said.
People also have used the whale IDs to look at adult survival, calf mortality and feeding areas.
Mizroch will eventually cross-match the Juneau catalogue with the one she created for the National Marine Mammal Lab, which has 24,000 photographs and a backlog of another 20,000 going in soon.
Incidentally, a whale's tail is not the only way to identify it, though that is the most low-tech way.
Moran said researchers also can shoot a whale with a dart, smaller than a pencil, that collects a blubber biopsy sample. Or, after a whale breaches, they can go over the surface with a fine net and skim up all the dead skin the whale sloughed off and test that for DNA.
The Web site is at www.afsc.noaa.gov/ABL/Humpback/.
