Humpback Pisces are willing to pay a lot to find the right partner. Some – according to research – quietly travel 6000 km.
Humpback whales can be found in all major oceans. Pacific whales are usually found around Alaska and Canada in the summer and near Mexico and Hawaii in the mating season. At first, one group was thought to favor Mexico and another to prefer Hawaii, but there is increasing evidence—the exchange of whale songs, for example—that the two groups mixed.
To better study this, researchers from Hawaii studied images of more than 26,000 different humpback whales. Photos taken by amateur photographers since 1977. Using smart software, they discovered that two men had made an unusual journey. They were spotted in both Mexico and Hawaii during the same mating season. One male traveled 4,545 kilometers in 53 days to join another group. Another traveled 5,944 kilometers in 49 days to follow suit. That’s as far as swimming from Utrecht to New York.
There is a good chance that the females will also travel these distances and that the males will follow in the process. What appears, however, is that the whale populations are less stable than previously thought. This, in turn, has consequences for the protection of the animals, because until now the group of whales in Mexico was considered an endangered species, but the group in Hawaii was not.
Read more here: Some humpback whales travel 6000 km in search of a mate†
