You
Named The Whale, Now Save Him
Out
of 11,000 submissions in our competition to name the humpback
whales we were tracking on their migration to the Southern Ocean,
we narrowed it down to the final 30. Over 150,000 people then
voted for their favorite name.
Mister
Splashy Pants is the winner by a nautical mile!
It seems like the world couldn't
get enough of Mister Splashy Pants with many websites encouraging
their readers to vote for 'Splashy'. And as we all know, once
the wonderful world of the internet got hold of Mister Splashy
Pants, it was all over bar the final splash.
Mister Splashy Pants got a
huge 119,367 votes (over 78 percent of the vote) with his nearest
rival being Humphrey at 4,329 (less than 3 percent). The rest
of the top ten were Aiko, Libertad, Mira, Kaimana, Aurora, Shanti,
Amal and Manami.
Many
websites also took credit for the rise and rise of the Splashy-Panted
One. Some websites encouraged their readers to cheat and vote
more than once, while others like Treehugger
seemed to imply that Mister Splashy Pants wasn't a proper name
for a whale.
We're sure Treehugger didn't
mean it that way but it resulted in a final wave of votes from
their readers that took Splashy to an unreachable position at
the top of the pod.
To
everyone who voted for Mister Splashy Pants, now that you've named
him, it's
time to save him - he might have a great name but he
and his friends are still in danger.
The
only way to be 100 percent sure that 'Splashy' doesn't get harpooned
is to stop killing all whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
With
just a few clicks you can help save Mister Splashy Pants and his
friends: take
action and tell the United States to do all it can
to put pressure on Japan to stop whaling and save the whales.
For
the people who voted for a name other than Mister Splashy Pants,
take heart. The scientists involved in the Great
Whale Trail tagged 20 humpback whales in the South
Pacific. The top 7 names will be used to name whales with a further
5 whales being named by our Whale Defenders.
In the coming days we will
post photos of Splashy taken earlier this year in the Pacific.
And last but not least, a big thanks to YOU, the people who made
the name-a-whale competition so much fun. |