Humpback Whale Traveled 15,100 km Between Brazil and Australia

A humpback whale first photographed at the Abrolhos Bank off Brazil in 2003 was identified again in September 2025 in Hervey Bay off the Queensland coast. The distance between the two locations is approximately 15,100 km. Stephanie Stack, a PhD candidate at Griffith University, said the sighting was the first documented case of a humpback traveling that distance.

The whale had not been seen for 22 years between the two photographs.

The match was found through the Happywhale platform, which stores fluke photographs contributed by researchers and citizen scientists. Individual humpback whales are identified by the shape, black-and-white patterns, and scars on the underside of their tails.

The platform uses an AI algorithm to compare new photographs against its database. Ted Cheeseman, a whale biologist at Southern Cross University and co-founder of Happywhale, is a co-author of the study.

A second whale was photographed in Hervey Bay in 2007 and again in 2013, then sighted off São Paulo in 2019. Researchers stated that the two cases represent the first recorded exchange in both directions between the Brazilian and eastern Australian populations. The study examined 19,283 fluke photographs collected from 1984 to 2025.

Humpback whales typically migrate between Antarctic feeding grounds and breeding areas near the Great Barrier Reef, completing an annual round trip of about 10,000 km. Stack noted that the animals may have traveled farther than the straight-line distances recorded.

The study concluded that conservation of marine resources requires cooperation between nations because the whales move across borders.