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Whale's Tail, Frederick Sound, Alaska, 1999

Commercial hunting of humpback whales, like this one flashing its flukes in Alaska's Frederick Sound, reduced their population to just a few thousand worldwide in the 1960s. But an international whaling ban has helped them rebound, and new census numbers show the North Pacific population alone could be more than 10,000 and possibly as many as 25,000.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "A Wilder Passage," May/June 1999, National Geographic Traveler magazine)

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Photograph by Michael Melford