Just a quick 8,000 mile journey. Photo: Unsplash
According to researchers from Royal Society Open Science, a humpback whale has made one of the most astonishingly long migrations ever recorded. The whale was seen in the Pacific Ocean off Colombia in 2017, then almost vanished for years until it was seen again in the Indian Ocean, some 8,000 miles away. In the intervening years, the whale was only seen a handful of times.
“Humpback whales undertake one of the longest known migrations of any mammal,” the authors of a paper on the whale’s voyage wrote. “While their migration route generally extends between latitudes, the breeding stocks are longitudinally separated and display high site fidelity to their feeding grounds… Presented here is the longest documented great-circle distance between sightings on wintering grounds of two different ocean basins of an adult male humpback whale, involving two breeding stocks in the eastern Pacific (stock G) and southwest Indian Ocean (stock C). These two stocks are separated by a minimum of 120° longitude, and a great-circle distance of 13,046 km.”
The authors think they know what drove the whale to make such an epic journey, and, like a whole slew of other things, it’s likely linked to our changing climate. The theory goes like this: as the oceans warm, krill — the tiny shrimp like creatures that make up much of a humpback whale’s diet — are either dying off in droves or moving to waters more suited to them. Although humpbacks can be found in oceans all over the planet, researchers believe this is the longest distance anyone has ever recorded. They generally swim from their breeding grounds in tropical waters to feeding grounds in cooler ones, but this humpback went between two breeding grounds.
“While actual reasons are unknown,” Ekaterina Kalashnikova of the Tanzania Cetaceans Program told the BBC, “amongst the drivers there might be global changes in the climate, extreme environmental events (that are more frequent nowadays), and evolutionary mechanisms of the species.”
The 13,046 kms (8077 miles) is the shortest possible route the whale could have taken, but it’s likely that it actually swam much farther.
