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As part of the Great Whale Trail Greenpeace has been running a ‘name a whale competition’ followed by a ‘vote for your favourite whale name’ poll.”>vote for your favourite whale name‘ poll.

The results have been somewhat surprising - ‘Mr Splashy Pants’ is leading the field by an uncommonly large margin.

Both BoingBoing and Reddit are running the Mr Splashy Pants as a possible whale name story. There’s been around 42,000 votes for whale names so far and Mr Splashy Pants is well in the lead.

Let’s watch this thing ‘go viral’…

English posts that contain Mr Splashy Pants per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

For your enjoyment, here are some of the comments on the Mr Splashy Pants story on Reddit.

Well I’m an active member of Greenpeace and I voted for Mr Splashy Pants. Genius. It may seem like a piss-take, but imagine the negative publicity involved with murdering Mr Splash Pants. PR catastrophe.

I voted for ‘Mister Splashy Pants’, but I pronounce it ‘Stephen Colbert’. Hope that’s within the rules.

I can see the headlines now, “Whalers off the coasts of Japan have admitted last Tuesday to killing Internet star, ‘Mr. Splashy Pants’..”

Mr. SP is in the lead at 47%…and Greenpeace would be foolish to complain about the free publicity. How much media interest will they get for a whale named Aiko, and how much for Mr. Splashy?

The plot thickens though …

From the Greenpeace International blog:

What isn’t so well known is the identity of the unsung hero that made it all possible. We don’t know all the details but from what we have managed to piece together, it appears that someone found a way around our ‘one vote per person’ rule and began a clicking frenzy that was to change the face of the competition.