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Little is known about the movements of male sperm whales, Physeter macrocephalus, in the North Atlantic. Recoveries of traditional harpoons and tags during commercial whaling indicated movements from Nova Scotia to Spain and from the Azores to Iceland and Spain. We compared collections of photo-identification images from different areas using the North Atlantic and Mediterranean Sperm Whale Catalogue and the Eurphlukes Phlex/Match programs. The largest collections of identified males (number of individuals, start and end date for data collection shown in parentheses) are for the Azores ). There were six matches between Andenes and Tromsø ( 25 nm), with three of these re-sighted in multiple years and three photo-identification matches from the Azores to Norway ( 2400 nm). In all cases individuals first photographed in the Azores (in 1993, 1999 and 2003) were matched to images collected later in Tromsø (in 2007 and. In 1997 a photo-identification image from Andenes matched a male stranded on the west coast of Ireland. No matches were made to images in smaller collections from Iceland, Nova Scotia, Greenland, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean. These findings show the value of data collected from whale watching vessels and the importance of collaboration between groups to allow investigation on an ocean basin scale. It is hoped that with the coordinated collection of more images from around the Atlantic, further insight might be gained into the movements of these widely ranging animals.

We assayed blood/tissue fluid samples from 20 harbour porpoises Phocoena phocoena from western Greenland coastal waters for antibodies against the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii by the direct agglutination test (DAT). Nine individuals (45%) were interpreted to be seropositive at 1:40 dilution and 4 (20%) were seropositive up to 1:160. Samples from these individuals were assayed by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and tissue samples of the DAT-positive animals were tested by a nested polymerase chain reaction (nPCR). Results from both methods were negative, suggesting the absence of infection in the tested animals. After chloroform clean-up, all were negative when re-assayed by DAT. We concluded that infection with T. gondii was absent in all 20 animals, despite the initially positive DAT results, and that the false positives resulted from non-specific adherence to tachyzoites in the DAT assay which could be removed by the chloroform clean-up method. Our results suggest that detecting antibodies against T. gondii using the DAT or the modified agglutination technique, particularly on samples from Arctic marine animals which often are rich in lipids, may lead to false positive results. For such samples, the use of ELISA or PCR on available tissue samples may be advocated as confirmatory tests in order to avoid false positives and overestimating seroprevalence.