The things whales do for love.
A humpback whale has stunned scientists with a journey that spanned three oceans and more than 8,000 miles, setting the record for the longest known migration between breeding grounds.
Scientists behind the research, published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, suggest that the odyssey may be linked to climate change — which is affecting ocean conditions and depleting food stocks — or possibly a shift in mating strategies.
“Changing climatic and ocean conditions could be driving these migrations to new breeding grounds. It may also be a case that increased competition for mates or food is encouraging individuals to seek new opportunities,” said Darren Croft, professor of behavioral ecology at the U.K’s University of Exeter and executive director of the Center for Whale Research.
The new research is an “incredible finding” that emphasizes the “remarkable distances” that this whale species travels, Croft told NBC News in an email on Wednesday.
Some whale migration routes are known to exceed 5,000 miles between feeding and breeding grounds, and humpback whales in particular have some of the longest migrations of any mammal.
But this whale went the extra mile — or thousand — in its quest.
The whale was first photographed as part of a group in 2013 off the Pacific coast of Colombia, South America, by a dedicated research vessel.
He was later identified in a similar area in 2017, but in 2022 he was spotted off the coast of Zanzibar, an island in the Indian Ocean that is 22 miles off the coast of east-central Africa.
“To put it into perspective, this male covered a distance equivalent to swimming from London to Tokyo and then partway back,” said Croft.
Ryan Reisinger, associate professor at the U.K.’s University of Southampton and the new report’s handling editor, said that “it was really exciting” when he first saw the findings.
The research provided “photographic evidence that confirmed humpback whales switch between breeding grounds,” he said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
The exact reason behind this particularly long migration remains unclear.
But it is understood that humpback whales travel annually from cooler feeding grounds in the summer where there is an abundance of food to warmer breeding grounds in the winter that are “more suitable for giving birth, but relatively scarce in food,” said Luke Rendell, a lecturer in biology at the U.K.’s University of St Andrews.
The new findings are based on photos submitted to the citizen science website, happywhale.com, where researchers, whale watchers and members of the public map the movement of whales around the world’s oceans.
“This creates a massive network of sensors, where people are observing and reporting” sightings of whales around the globe, Reisinger said.
“Individual research teams can’t get everywhere they need to go, especially for marine mammals, which are difficult to observe,” Reisinger explained.
The database uses artificial intelligence to analyze the submitted photos and identify individual whales based on their unique shapes and markings.
The algorithm “uses the shape, pattern, and features of a whale’s tail,” known as a fluke, to identify individual whales, according to Happy Whale’s website. The organization claims that a humpback whale’s tail is so unique that there is a “97% to 99%” success rate for matching photos submitted for the species.
