A humpback whale has been documented travelling about 15,100km from Brazil to Australia, setting a new record for the longest distance between sightings of an individual humpback, researchers say.
The whale was first photographed in 2003 at the Abrolhos Bank off the coast of Bahia, Brazil, and was spotted again in September 2025 in Hervey Bay, Queensland. The 22-year gap between sightings is also remarkable, according to Stephanie Stack, a PhD candidate at Griffith University and co-author of a study published in Royal Society Open Science.
“It’s extraordinary to photograph a whale that’s gone this distance – it has never happened before,” Stack said. The identification was made possible through the Happywhale platform, which uses an AI algorithm to match photographs of whale flukes – the unique underside of their tails, comparable to human fingerprints.
The study also documented a second whale that travelled about 14,200km from Hervey Bay to São Paulo, Brazil. These are the first recorded exchanges in both directions between the Brazilian and eastern Australian humpback whale populations. Researchers believe such journeys are rare, possibly single-lifetime events, rather than regular migratory shifts.
The findings highlight the need for international collaboration in marine conservation, as humpback whales are migratory animals that cross borders. Stack noted that climate change is likely to affect migration patterns in the future, with Antarctic krill populations under threat in the Southern Ocean feeding grounds.
