In what has become the literal definition of catching the tail end of a story, imaginations have been sparked across the scientific community this week by the tale of the humpback whale that journeyed more than 13,000km across three oceans, tracked using a pioneering new technology described as a ‘modified facial recognition’ for distinguishing the unique markings on a whale’s fluke.

Journeying from South America to Africa and moving between the east Pacific Ocean and southwest Indian Ocean, scientists have not only chalked this up as the longest distance recorded for an individual humpback whale but recognised the study itself as one filled with ‘exciting implications and opportunities’ for the identification of individual whales using such technology. 

The story began ten years ago, when this individual was initially spotted off the coast of Colombia. Its sighting was recorded to Happywhale, a platform devised to enable researchers, citizen scientists, and whale watchers to document sightings of whales. Over the course of the next decade, this individual humpback was tracked – as it hopped from population to population of whales – all the way to the coasts of Zanzibar.

While humpback whales are known to undertake one of the longest known migrations of any mammal, previous records had placed the furthest distance travelled by an individual at around 10,000km. While little is still known about the behavioural ecology of humpback whales, that hasn’t stopped the experts from speculating. 

Among the many suggestions posited in the study – published this month in Royal Society Open Science – chief among them was that it was the desire to mate and shift its breeding ground that spurred this long-distance Lothario to undertake such an odyssey.   

Our current understanding suggests the behaviour displayed by this individual is unusual as humpback whales commonly display “fidelity to their feeding grounds”. Dr Ekaterina Kalashnikova, co-lead author on the study suggests that the long-distance movement presented in this case is “atypical” and therefore “raises questions as to what its drivers are”, adding that these could be “but are not necessarily limited to mating strategies.”

Other reasons behind the “habitat exploration” displayed by this particular humpback whale could include the impact of global climatic changes and altered environmental conditions. Krill distribution in the Southern Ocean, for example, fluctuates yearly “impacting humpback whale distribution on the feeding grounds,” writes Dr Kalashnikova. 

“On the other hand, population increases may also be a driver of these breeding ground shifts, when animals may need to explore new breeding or feeding areas due to competition from larger, more established males in either area.”

In any scenario, Dr Kalashnikova posits that the movements made in this instance display “the first record of a humpback whale alternating breeding grounds between the Pacific and the Indian Oceans.”

But there’s more to the tale of the whale than this, suggests Dr Olaf Meynecke, a research fellow at Griffith University and humpback whale migration specialist unconnected with the study, pointing at the “bigger and more exciting” picture that rests in the whale identification technology used to bring the study to life.

“Humpback whales will easily travel 10,000km a year,” Dr Meynecke tells Oceanographic Magazine. “And we also have great documentation of whales crossing over to other populations quite routinely. The ocean is well connected and humpback whales occupy pretty much all the oceans of the world, so it’s logical they would travel long distances.

“It’s nice that we have been able to document that particular whale, but what is more important is to understand the bigger picture. The more whales we can identify, the more we will learn about the drivers of their movements.”

Identification of the hero of this particular tale was made using what has been called a “modified facial recognition technology” used to identify the unique and individual markings on a whale’s fluke. This pioneering technology is the brainchild of Ted Cheeseman, founder of Happywhale. It’s a software that instantly compares each image of a whale’s fluke submitted by researchers or citizen scientists with the 900,000 photographs from around the world it has stored in its database. According to Cheeseman – a graduate student in marine ecology at Southern Cross University, these images cover 109,000 individual humpback whales. 

“And this is what’s really exciting,” says Dr Waynecke. “The more we advance technology and our ability to identify individuals like this humpback whale, the greater understanding we gain of just how connected the ocean really is.”

And it’s this which could spell a bright new future for the development of conservation and animal protection methods.

“By understanding the behaviours of individuals the greater our compulsion and means to protect them will be,” says Dr Waynecke.

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