Overview
- A study published Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science reports two individual humpback whales were photographed in both eastern Australia and Brazil, with minimum straight-line separations of about 14,200 kilometres and 15,100 kilometres.
- The team compared 19,283 high-quality fluke photographs from 1984–2025 using the global Happywhale platform, automated image recognition and manual verification to confirm the matches.
- These inter-basin exchanges are extremely rare in the dataset, appearing in only two whales out of nearly 20,000 identified individuals over four decades, about 0.01 percent of the sample.
- Photographic records show only endpoints, so researchers cannot determine the whales’ exact routes or movements between sightings, but the findings are consistent with the ‘Southern Ocean Exchange’ idea and may link to changing Antarctic sea-ice and krill distributions.
- Scientists say the rare crossings could matter for genetic diversity and the spread of whale songs, and they call for continued global photo‑ID collaboration and monitoring to track whether such exchanges become more common as oceans change.