No ocean too wide for a humpback whale in love

The humpback whale is ready to pay dearly to find the right partner. Some, according to research, quietly travel 6000 kilometers for this.

Humpback whales can be found in all major oceans. Pacific humpback whales are typically found around Alaska and Canada in summer and near Mexico and Hawaii during mating season. At first, one group was thought to have a preference for Mexico and another for Hawaii, but there’s growing evidence—by exchanging whale songs, for example—that the two groups mix.

To study this even further, researchers in Hawaii studied photos of more than 26,000 different humpback whales. Photos taken by amateur photographers since 1977. Using clever software, they discovered that two males had made an extraordinary journey. They had been spotted in Mexico and Hawaii during the same mating season. One of the men had traveled 4545 kilometers in 53 days to join another group. Another traveled 5,944 kilometers in 49 days to do the same. It’s further than swimming from Utrecht to New York.

Chances are that the females will also travel these distances and the males will follow them in the process. What it shows in any case is that the groups of whales are much less fixed than we think. This in turn has implications for animal welfare, as until now the group of whales from Mexico was considered an endangered species, but the group from Hawaii was not.

Learn more here: Some humpback whales travel 6,000 kilometers in search of a mate†