A humpback whale has completed a 15,000km journey from Brazil to Australia, setting a new record for the longest distance documented between sightings of an individual humpback, researchers say.
The whale was first photographed in 2003 at the Abrolhos Bank off Brazil's north-eastern state of Bahia, a key nursery area. In September 2025, it was spotted again in Hervey Bay off the Queensland coast, a distance of about 15,100km.
Stephanie Stack, a PhD candidate at Griffith University and co-author of a study in Royal Society Open Science, called it 'extraordinary to photograph a whale that’s gone this distance – it has never happened before.' The whale had not been sighted for 22 years.
The identification was made using fluke photos on the Happywhale platform, which uses AI to match individual whales by their unique tail patterns. The study also found a second whale that travelled about 14,200km between Australia and Brazil, marking the first recorded exchange in both directions between the two populations.
Researchers noted that such long migrations are rare, likely single-lifetime events. The findings underscore the need for international collaboration in marine conservation, as climate change may alter migration patterns in the future.
