Using images of the whales' tail flukes, a research team has determined that a whale that was off Queensland, Australia, in 2007 appeared off São Paulo, Brazil, in 2019 - a distance of 14,200 kilometers.
Similarly, a whale from Bahia, Brazil, was tracked 22 years later, 15,100 kilometers away, at Hervey Bay in Australia.
The distances are the longest ever measured for humpback whales.
The movement of single individuals between two distant mating sites helps keep the population genetically diverse, says Stephanie Stack at Griffith University in Australia.
The whales may also bring new “songs” or “dialects,” according to the researchers.
