A male humpback whale specimen initially spotted near the coast of Colombia has been seen after ten years near Zanzibar, Africa. Research that tracked the mammal’s movements and was published in the Royal Society Open Science documented that the animal traveled a journey of almost 9,000 miles from South America to Africa. According to the researchers, this is by far the longest journey ever recorded for a single whale. For the research, they used Happywhale, a platform co-founded by research co-author Ted Cheeseman, a whale biologist at Southern Cross University, which allowed researchers, citizen scientists and avid whale watchers to record any sightings and then identify individual whales from their typical vents. The platform works by leveraging a “facial recognition” based technology repurposed for the morphology of whales. As reported by the Guardian, Cheeseman said that “the distance traveled was unusual, almost double the distance traveled for migration”, pointing out that the whale ended up off its usual course.
The study authors were then able to identify that it was always the same specimen since, “A whale’s tail, or ‘whale print,’ is unique and identifiable as a fingerprint. It’s like a five-meter-long banner that serves as an identity document,” Cheeseman explained, pointing out that each one has its own different markings, pigmentations and scars.
Whale expert and scholar Vanessa Pirotta, who was not involved in the research, stated that it is also not unusual for whales to choose not to follow specific routes and change them freely. “Sometimes, instead of heading toward the east coast of Australia, the Migaloo whale changed its usual route and crossed into New Zealand instead.”
