What whales do for love.
Humpback whales amazed scientists with their journey across three oceans and more than 8,000 miles, setting a record for the longest known migration between breeding grounds.
Scientists involved in the study, published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, say the venture could be linked to climate change, which is affecting ocean conditions and depleting food stocks, or perhaps breeding strategies. suggests that it may be related to change.
“Changes in climate and ocean conditions may drive these migrations to new breeding grounds, and increased competition for mates and food may prompt individuals to seek new opportunities. “There are some,” said Darren Croft, professor of behavioral ecology and executive director of the Whale Research Center at the University of Exeter in the UK.
The new study is an “incredible discovery” that highlights the “remarkable distances” that this whale species travels, Croft told NBC News in an email Wednesday.
Some whale migration routes are known to span more than 5,000 miles between feeding and breeding grounds, making humpback whales the longest migratory distance of any mammal.
But the whale continued its quest for another mile, or even 1,000 miles.
The whale was first photographed as part of a pod in 2013 off the Pacific coast of Colombia, South America, by a dedicated research vessel.
It was later identified in similar waters in 2017, and in 2022 off the coast of Zanzibar, an island in the Indian Ocean 35 miles off the coast of east-central Africa.
“To put it into perspective, this man swam the same distance from London to Tokyo and back,” Croft said.
Ryan Reisinger, an associate professor at the University of Southampton in the UK and editor of the new report, said he was “really excited” when he first saw the findings.
He said in a phone interview Wednesday that the study provides “photographic evidence that humpback whales switch breeding grounds.”
The exact reason behind this particularly long migration is still unknown.
However, humpback whales are known to migrate each year from cooler summer feeding grounds where food is plentiful to warmer winter breeding grounds “which are better for calving but where food is relatively scarce,” said Luke Rendell. said. He is a lecturer in biology at the University of St. Andrews, UK.
The new discovery is based on photos posted to happywhale.com, a citizen science website where researchers, whale watchers and the public map the movements of whales in the world’s oceans.
“This creates a large network of sensors where people observe and report whale sightings around the world,” Reisinger said.
“Individual research teams can’t go where they want to go, especially with marine mammals that are difficult to observe,” Reisinger explained.
The database uses artificial intelligence to analyze submitted photos and identify individual whales based on their unique shapes and markings.
According to the Happy Whale website, the algorithm “utilizes the shape, pattern, and characteristics of the whale’s tail, known as the fluke,” to identify individual whales. The group claims that the humpback whale’s tail is so unique that the match rate for photos submitted of the species is “97% to 99%.”
