Using tens of thousands of images of whales' tail fins, an international research team has determined that a whale that was off Queensland in Australia in 2007 was recorded off Brazil in 2019 - a distance of 1,420 miles.
Similarly, a whale was tracked from Bahia off the coast of Brazil to Hervey Bay in Australia, a journey of 1,510 miles over 22 years.
The distances are the longest ever measured for a humpback whale.
"The movement of single individuals between two distant mating sites helps keep the population genetically diverse," says Stephanie Stack, one of the researchers.
The whales may also bring new “songs” or “dialects,” according to the researchers.
