© F. Johansen, via Associated PressThe image above, taken in 2001, was used to identify a female humpback whale who traveled more than 6,000 miles from Brazil to Madagascar.
If you cruise the Web you can find long-lost friends, high school sweethearts and ... far-traveling humpback whales.
With the help of Flickr, a photo-sharing site, Peter Stevick, a biologist at the College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, Me., and colleagues have identified a whale that made an unprecedented journey, an epic 6,000 miles from Brazil to Madagascar, about 10 years ago. The whale's adventure is described in Biology Letters.
Carole Carlson, an author of the paper and a researcher at the College of the Atlantic, often checks Flickr for whale photos because humpbacks can be identified by their tails, which are as individual as fingerprints. An amateur photographer had taken a photo on a film camera in 2001 and only recently posted it. That photo matched one taken by researchers of a whale off the coast of Brazil in 1999.
There is no way to know what the humpback's exact journey was, but the shortest route it could have taken would have been across the south Atlantic Ocean and around Africa to arrive in Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean, said Dr. Stevick, the study's lead author.
During the course of a year, humpback whales spend their summers in cooler climates and focus their efforts on getting as much nourishment as possible. In the winter, they travel to warm tropical areas where they mate and give birth to their calves. It is not uncommon for the whales to travel close to 4,000 miles in a single year.
But this female's journey was unprecedented. "It traveled between two different breeding habitats, which is something that is virtually unseen," Dr. Stevick said. Just why this particular whale made the unusual journey is unclear. It is possible that it was in search of a better habitat, or that it simply got lost, he said.
Reader Comments
to our Newsletter