Michael Andrew Bigg (December 22, 1939 – October 18, 1990) was an English-born Canadian marine biologist who is recognized as the founder of modern research on killer whales.

[1] With his colleagues, he developed new techniques for studying killer whales and, off British Columbia and Washington, conducted the first population census of the animals anywhere in the world.

Bigg attended Cowichan Senior Secondary School in Duncan, and then the University of British Columbia, where he studied falcons, water shrews, and harbor seals.

[2] During the mid-'60s and early 1970s, a change in global opinion saw the development of public & scientific awareness of the species, starting with the first live-capture and display of a killer whale known as Moby Doll that had been harpooned off Saturna Island in 1964.

[3] It was assumed that the killer whale population in these waters numbered in the thousands; however, as a standard wildlife-management practice for "harvestable" animals, the Canadian government determined that a census should be done.

[2] In 1970, Bigg became head of marine mammal research at the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo and was given the task of the census.

Bigg's first technique was to send 15,000 questionnaires to boaters, lighthouse keepers, fishermen, and others who frequented the British Columbia coast, asking them to record killer whale sightings in one day.

[4] The results of the survey taken on July 27, 1971, indicated that the number of killer whales in the British Columbia region of the area was at most 350, drastically fewer than had been assumed.

In the early 1970s, Bigg and his colleagues discovered that individual killer whales can be identified from a good photograph of the animal's dorsal fin and saddle patch taken when it surfaces.

Variations such as nicks, scratches, and tears on the dorsal fin, and the pattern of white or grey in the saddle patch, are sufficient to distinguish killer whales from each other.

Bigg's team of killer whale photographers and spotters quickly grew to include hundreds of volunteers from along the coast, a project that was eventually formalized in 1999 as the B.C.

Bigg and his colleagues gathered enough data to produce a complete family tree documenting the maternal-side relationships of every killer whale on the British Columbia and Washington coasts.

One of the key discoveries of Bigg's team was that there was divergence in sympatric pods of killer whales living near the British Columbia coastline between residents which ate almost exclusively fish, and transients which hunted marine mammals and other warm-blooded prey.

The day the newborn was first sighted, and after his sex was revealed, he was instantly given the name "Mike" by Bigg's longtime colleague Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island.