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Wildlife: Going the Distance
Herman Melville may have declared humpback whales the most “light-hearted of all the whales,” but their migratory journeys are far from frivolous. In fact, researchers recently found that the whales travel more than 5,100 miles from winter breeding grounds off Pacific Central America to their summer feeding grounds in Antarctica, the longest migration of any mammal.
The study validates a long-held assumption that humpbacks travel to warm-water areas during the winter. “It’s very exciting because this was the first time we were actually able to quantify this on a global scale,” says Kristin Rasmussen, a biologist with Cascadia Research Collective and lead biologist in the study.
Researchers identified individual humpbacks off Central America by comparing unique markings on their flukes and then compared them to photographs of humpbacks taken in Antarctica and cataloged at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.
They further noticed that the whales’ presence so far north coincided with the occurrence of cold water at the equator, both in the eastern Pacific Ocean and the eastern Atlantic, where another southern hemisphere humpback whale population can be found north of the equator during winter.
“This pattern strongly suggests that humpbacks seek warm waters in which to have their calves, regardless of how far they must swim to find them,” says Daniel Palacios, an oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service and an author of the paper.
