Pictures of Whale Visiting Different Neighborhood Not Just a Fluke
This whale’s tail tells the tale of the longest migratory trip for an individual marine mammal on record.
A female humpback whale was confirmed to have traveled more than 6,200 miles, almost twice the usual distance, according to research recently published in the U.K.-based Royal Society journal Biology Letters. The scholarly article, credited to seven authors, pointed to photographs of the same animal taken during whale-watching excursions off the coast of Brazil and some months later in Madagascar waters, almost 1,000 kilometers if she took the shortest possible route for a whale.
Co-author and Research group leader, Dr Peter Stevick, said researchers at the College of the Atlantic's Allied Whale (Maine) discovered a photograph on the Internet that is remarkably similar to an earlier photograph taken in another part of the world.
On a whale-watching tour, Norwegian vacationer Freddy Johansen photographed a humpback whale diving in waters off the coast of Madagascar. The image that captured all the attention was of the whale’s tail, ideally displaying shapes and markings that are unique to each animal. Scientists refer to these tail signatures as “flukes,” considering them the definitive method for identifying individual whales. The discovery has marine biologists pretty much blown out of the water.
Not only did this whale travel a quarter of the way around the world, something extremely unusual for a female humpback and twice the distance of the usual annual north-south migration, she wandered into a completely different breeding ground.
She traveled south across the Atlantic and headed east at the southern tip of Africa, winding up in the Indian Ocean. Stevick points out humpback whales rarely move between breeding areas, behavior that has led scientists to believe in the natural genetic isolation of different breeding groups.
“Her example shows us that we should pay attention,” says Stevick. “Whales may not always do what we expect, or remain in tidy groups. The picture of their behavior is messier, and their east-west movement could well be more important than we have previously recognized.”
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