2 humpback whales swam record-breaking distance, photos reveal

World 2 humpback whales swam record-breaking distance between breeding grounds, photos reveal May 20, 2026 / 10:14 AM EDT / CBS/AFP Add CBS News on Google A pair of humpback whales swam between the eastern shores of Australia and breeding grounds in Brazil, research published on Wednesday found. The distances of the journeys are the greatest ever recorded.The work by a team of international scientists used tens of thousands of images taken of whale tales to identify the two vast sea-dwelling mammals and reveal they had popped up on both sides of the world.One was spotted in Queensland in 2007 and then appeared near Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2019 — a distance across oceans of about 8,823 miles.Another was seen off the coast of Bahia in Brazil before being sighted 22 years later in Hervey Bay, Australia, about 9,383 miles away, according to the study published in Royal Society Open Science. The pictures represent the longest distance ever seen between two pictures of the same humpback whale, researchers said.Such vast journeys by the whales — which can grow up to 55 feet long — are exceedingly rare, they added."Despite their rarity, these exchanges matter for the long-term health of whale populations," Griffith University PhD researcher and report co-author Stephanie Stack said. "Occasional individuals moving between distant breeding grounds can help maintain genetic diversity across populations," she added.They "may even carry new song styles from one region to another — humpback whale songs are known to spread culturally across ocean basins, much like music trends in human populations."The study drew on nearly 20,000 photographs collected between 1984 and 2025 from eastern Australia and Latin America, contributed by both scientists and citizen scientists. The photos were run through an automated image-recognition algorithm, and the team was able to identify two humpback whales that had been photographed in both regions. "This kind of re...