Humpback Whale's 9.4K-Mile Trek Sets Migration Record

A humpback whale that vanished from view for more than two decades just turned up in record-setting fashion, the Guardian reports. Researchers say a whale photographed off Brazil in 2003 was identified again in 2025 in Australia's Hervey Bay—nearly 9,400 miles away—marking the longest documented distance between confirmed sightings of a single humpback.

The match came via Happywhale, a photo database that uses AI to compare images of tail flukes, which are as individually distinctive as human fingerprints. Out of more than 19,000 fluke photos examined from Latin America and eastern Australia, only two whales showed crossovers between the Brazilian and eastern Australian populations—one making the new 9,400-mile record, another logging more than 8,800 miles, both of them longer than any previously known humpback journeys, the AP reports. The photos analyzed dated back to the 1980s, ABC.net reports.

The long gaps between sightings—22 years and 6 years, respectively—suggest these are rare, possibly once-in-a-lifetime detours, not new migration routes. Scientists still don't know which paths the whales took or how far they actually swam, although they do know the whales traveled in opposite directions, but they say the finds underscore that protecting migratory species demands cross-border cooperation, especially as climate change reshapes Antarctic feeding grounds.