Overview
- An international team published the findings Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science, setting new distance records between confirmed sightings of the same humpback whales.
- One whale seen at Brazil’s Abrolhos Bank in 2003 was resighted in Hervey Bay, Australia in September 2025, a minimum straight-line separation of about 15,100 kilometers.
- Another individual photographed in Hervey Bay in 2007 and 2013 was later identified off São Paulo in 2019, a separation of roughly 14,200 kilometers in the opposite direction.
- The team matched 19,283 fluke photos on the Happywhale platform using image-recognition software and manual checks, relying on each whale’s unique tail patterns much like fingerprints.
- Researchers report these exchanges are extremely rare at about 0.01% of identified whales, note routes and true swim distances remain unknown, and say the results support a Southern Ocean mixing zone that could affect gene flow, song sharing, and future movements as sea ice and krill shift with climate change.