In August 2022, a male humpback whale astonished marine scientists by appearing off the coast of Zanzibar, Tanzania, after embarking on an extraordinary journey spanning at least 13,046 kilometers (8,106 miles) from the Pacific waters off Colombia. The whale's unprecedented migration is the longest ever recorded for an individual humpback whale, nearly doubling the typical distance these marine mammals travel during their seasonal migrations.
The whale, identified as HW-MN1300828, was first photographed in 2013 off the Gulf of Tribugá in the Colombian Pacific. It was sighted again in 2017 near Bahía Solano, another location along Colombia's Pacific coast. Five years later, in 2022, the same whale was photographed off Fumba in the Zanzibar Channel, part of the southwestern Indian Ocean. The sightings confirmed that the whale had traversed a great-circle distance of 13,046 kilometers—a record-breaking journey for the species.
"This whale was sighted on the coast of Colombia (twice) and then again on the coast of Zanzibar, five years later, making it the longest orthodromic distance [the shortest path between two points on a sphere] recorded between breeding areas of a humpback whale," said biologist Ekaterina Kalashnikova of the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies in Mozambique, as reported by EL PAÍS.
Humpback whales are renowned for their lengthy migrations, typically traveling up to 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) north-south between feeding grounds in cold polar waters and breeding grounds in warmer tropical regions. However, such long-distance movement in an east-west direction is considered extremely rare for these whales. Scientists describe this type of longitudinal migration as "atypical," noting that humpback whale populations generally do not mix across oceans.
"The feat of HW-MN1300828's migration was truly impressive and unusual even for this highly migratory species," Kalashnikova told BBC News.
The discovery was made possible through the use of Happywhale, a citizen science platform that enables researchers and the public to upload and share photographs of whales. Each humpback whale has unique patterns, scars, and pigmentation on the underside of its tail fluke, which serve as a kind of fingerprint for individual identification. Artificial intelligence technology is used to match these identifiers across the growing database, facilitating the tracking of whale movements around the globe.
"It's like a five-meter banner of their ID," Ted Cheeseman, a researcher associated with Happywhale, explained to The Guardian. "Each whale has its own different patterns, pigmentation, and scars."
Upon analyzing the photographs, researchers initially questioned the validity of the findings due to the extraordinary distance covered by the whale. "This was a very exciting find, the kind of discovery where our first response was that there must be some error," Cheeseman told Live Science in an email.
The study documenting HW-MN1300828's journey was published on December 10 in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
"This extreme distance movement demonstrates behavioral plasticity, which may play an important role in adaptation strategies to global environmental changes and perhaps be an evolved response to various pressures," the authors wrote.
Scientists are considering several factors that might have motivated the whale's journey. One possibility is that the male whale sought to increase its reproductive chances by mingling with members of other populations.
"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," whale scientist Dr. Vanessa Pirotta told The Guardian. "We are learning way more because we have the tools in place."
This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq