2 whales swam a record-breaking distance between their breeding grounds, images reveal

A pair of humpback whales swam between Australia’s east coast and their breeding grounds in Brazil, a study published Wednesday found. The greatest travel distances ever recorded.

Work by an international team of scientists used tens of thousands of images taken from whale tales to identify the two largest sea mammals and reveal that they came from both sides of the world.

One was spotted in Queensland in 2007 and then appeared near Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2019 – a distance of about 8,823 km across the oceans.

One was spotted off the coast of Bahia in Brazil before being spotted 22 years later in Hervey Bay, Australia, about 9,383 miles away, according to research published in Royal Society Open Science.

The images represent the longest distance ever seen between two images of the same whale, researchers said.

Such long journeys by whales – which can grow up to 55 meters in length – are extremely rare, they added.

“Despite their rarity, these interactions are critical to the long-term health of many whale populations,” said Griffith University PhD researcher and co-author Stephanie Stack.

“Sometimes people moving between distant breeding grounds can help maintain genetic diversity in many populations,” he added.

“They may carry new song styles from one region to another – humpback whale songs are known to spread culturally across oceans, just like musical styles for humans.”

The study drew on nearly 20,000 photographs collected between 1984 and 2025 from eastern Australia and Latin America, contributed by both scientists and citizen scientists. The images were processed using an automatic image recognition algorithm, and the team was able to identify two whales that had been photographed in both regions.

“This type of research highlights the importance of citizen science,” said Dr. Cristina Castro of the Pacific Whale Foundation in a statement. “Every image contributes to our understanding of whale biology and, in this case, helped reveal the most extreme movements ever recorded.”

The researchers said the work also proved a theory about whaling patterns called the “Southern Ocean Exchange.”

That theory suggests that mammals sometimes go to feeding grounds in the Antarctic but then make a different journey home – ending up in an entirely new breeding ground.

“Climate-driven changes in the Southern Ocean, including changes in sea ice and the distribution of Antarctic krill (the whale’s primary prey), may facilitate such crossings over time,” Griffith University said.

Because it is primarily commercial whaling, humpback whales were listed as endangered in the US in the 1970s, according to NOAA, and the final moratorium on commercial whaling was established in 1985.