Feature story - 10 December, 2007
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 favourite 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.
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.
And last but not least, a big thanks to YOU, the people who made the name-a-whale competition so much fun.