Humpback Whale Makes Record Migration of Over 8,077 Miles From Colombia to Zanzibar

In a whale migration of epic proportions, a humpback has been recorded making a journey of more than 8,077 miles from Colombia to Tanzania.

A team of marine ecologists says it’s the longest individual whale migration ever recorded, topping the old record of 6,214 miles.

“Humpback whales have complex behavior, but to find an adult male whale halfway around the world is unexpected,” said co-author of the research Ted Cheeseman, a whale biologist at Southern Cross University, as reported by Science.

Cheeseman explained that, while a whale will sometimes move from one group to a different one nearby, in order to get all the way to Tanzania the humpback would have had to pass through two Atlantic-based groups.

“This is more ‘foreign’ than any humpback previously documented,” Cheeseman noted.

The observation of the whale’s extraordinary journey was enabled by modified facial recognition software that was designed to identify whales by the distinct shapes of their flukes.

Photos helped identify the whale in three locations. Kalashnikova et al., Royal Society Open Science, 2024

These “flukeprints” have saved marine scientists many hours of looking over photos in the hopes of uncovering a match based on distinctive markings such as scars, notches and color patterns, said marine mammal biologist Christie McMillan with the Fisheries and Oceans Canada Cetacean Research Program, who did not participate in the study.

A flukeprint is as unique as a fingerprint.

“It’s like a five-metre banner of their ID,” said Cheeseman, as The Guardian reported.

According to McMillan, the identification of the humpback who made the incredible journey is a testament to the usefulness of Happywhale.com, a fluke-identification program co-founded by Cheeseman 15 years ago that examines photographs by biologists as well as ordinary people, reported Science.

After decades of leading nature tours in polar regions, Cheeseman found that regular citizens like his customers could be a valuable source of data.

Dr. Vanessa Pirotta, a whale scientist who was not part of the research team, said the technology could “take a single day of whale watching and turn it into something remarkable,” as The Guardian reported.

Happywhale “is an incredibly valuable tool” that “has allowed for collaboration at a scale that could not have been possible before,” McMillan said in Science.

The Happywhale software compares each fluke image with more than 900,000 photographs from all over the world. Cheeseman said the database includes images of 109,000 individuals, including an “Old Timer” first spotted in 1972 who was seen again this past summer.

In 2013 and 2017, Happywhale identified the record-breaking humpback around summer breeding grounds off the coast of Colombia. In 2022, the whale was spotted again, this time near Zanzibar — an archipelago that is part of Tanzania — off the eastern African coast. The humpback’s distinctive fluke pattern matched the previous images captured in the eastern Pacific.

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The finding was surprising since humpbacks normally stay in the same ocean basin, plus the Colombia population typically migrates from its breeding grounds in South America to Antarctica feeding grounds.

“Humpback whales undertake one of the longest known migrations of any mammal. While their migration route generally extends between latitudes, the breeding stocks are longitudinally separated and display high site fidelity to their feeding grounds,” the study published in Royal Society Open Science said.

The researchers aren’t sure where the record-setting humpback traveled between sightings, but it is likely that the whale went to Antarctica before the southwestern Indian Ocean, the home of another breeding population, according to co-author of the study Ekaterina Kalashnikova, a marine biologist with the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies and founder of the Tanzania Cetaceans Program.

It is “very likely the distances [the animal swam] were even greater” than the documented distance, Kalashinikova said, as reported by Science.

“This could be a simple story of a deeply confused whale,” said marine biologist Alexander Werth of Hampden-Sydney College, who was not part of the research. “But it’s more likely that this intrepid explorer is a lonely male desperately seeking mates.”

The findings demonstrate Happywhale’s potential to leverage the observations of citizen scientists to add vital data in understudied areas of cetacean research, said marine biologist Lisa Kettemer with the Arctic University of Norway, who was not involved in the research.

“We are learning way more because we have the tools in place,” Pirotta said, as The Guardian reported. “As a world we are way more connected, and that means that the stories that we can tell about whales are more connected globally than ever before.”

Researchers weren’t yet sure if the new technology was providing more information about established whale movements or if the unusual patterns indicated a changing environment impacted by climate change.

“This extreme distance movement demonstrates behavioural plasticity, which may play an important role in adaptation strategies to global environmental changes and perhaps be an evolved response to various pressures, underlining the importance of consolidation of global datasets on wide-ranging marine mammals,” the study said.