A new study shows that a male humpback whale crossed at least three oceans in search of sex. The whale’s journey spanned twice the longest great-circle distance ever recorded for this species (Megaptera novaeangliae), scientists said. Great-circle distance refers to the shortest distance between two points on Earth, measured on the planet’s spherical surface.
The whale’s journey, which began off the coast of Colombia in the eastern Pacific Ocean and ended off the coast of Zanzibar in the southwest Indian Ocean, took it 8,106 miles (13,046 kilometers) around the world, researchers said.
Study co-author Ted Cheeseman, a doctoral student at Southern Cross University in Australia and director of HappyWhale, said the whale likely swam east from Colombia and rode prevailing currents in the Southern Ocean to visit humpback whale populations in the Atlantic Ocean.
HappyWhale is an image database where the researchers collected evidence for the study. “This was a very exciting discovery, one to which our first reaction was that there must be some error,” Cheeseman told Live Science in an email.
Along with the surprising mileage, one of the most important findings from the study was that the whales visited multiple humpback whale populations along the way, exploring farther than any other humpback whale known to science, Cheeseman said.
Humpback whales typically follow a very consistent migration pattern, moving between feeding grounds in cold waters near the poles and breeding areas closer to the tropics. The whales are known to swim more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km) in a north-south direction each year, but they don’t travel very far in an east-west direction and generally don’t mix with other populations.
The cross-ocean journey observed in the new study shows that humpback whale migration is more flexible than researchers previously thought. While scientists have occasionally recorded similar migrations before — such as the case of a female humpback whale that traveled 6,100 miles (9,800 km) from Brazil to Madagascar between 1999 and 2001 — the male in the new study set a new distance record, traveling from one breeding area to another.
“We have been able to document new behavior that provides important insights into [humpback whale] ecology,” study lead author Ekaterina Kalashnikova, a biologist working with the Tanzania Cetacean Program and the Barazzuto Center for Scientific Studies in Mozambique, told Live Science in an email.
The finding is based on photographs taken by the researchers between 2013 and 2022, and which they later posted on HappyWhale.
The images showed the same sexually mature male at two locations in Colombia and then five years later in the Zanzibar Channel, each time accompanied by a competing group — a group of whales in which a female is closely guarded by a male “dominant escort” and other males compete for access to her, Kalashnikova said.
The motivation for the trip was likely sex, with the male in question increasing his chances of reproducing by mingling with members of another breeding population. According to the study, other reasons for the whale’s unusual adventure may be environmental shifts that affect the distribution of food; climate change; and humpback whale population growth, which increases competition among males for food and during breeding season.