Elicit non-trivial dialogue from students. Guide students to reflection and analysis of the experience. Encourage students to share their perceptions and beliefs. Summarize and review similarities and differences.

Discussion of fingerprint patterns; relation to fluke patterns of whales.

Objective: Students will discuss the matching experience and focus their thinking on the fact that the uniqueness of fingerprint patterns used for human identification is the same key fluke patterns provided for whale identification.

Activity: Bring the group together and ask the students to reflect on how they arrived at their choices for matching of fingerprints. Discuss the pattern-recognition techniques used by students in this activity. Lead into a discussion about how researchers use these same techniques for telling one whale from another. When researchers want to tell one whale from another, they try to look at the whale's fluke or tail. The underside of the humpback's flukes has a black and white pattern that is different on each individual - a kind of natural "name tag" or "fingerprint."

Assessment: Student contribution to group discussion.