The findings set new records for the greatest distances ever confirmed between sightings of individual humpback whales anywhere in the world. “Discoveries like this are only possible because of investment into long-term multi-decadal research programs and international collaboration,” Griffith University Ph.D. Candidate and co-author Stephanie Stack said. “These whales were photographed decades apart, by different people, in opposite parts of the world, separated by two different oceans, and yet we can connect their journey.” By comparing tens of thousands of photographs of whale tails, also known as “flukes”, the team identified two individual whales that had been photographed in both eastern Australia and Brazil. One whale was first photographed in Hervey Bay, Queensland, in 2007, and was seen again in the same area in 2013 before turning up off the coast of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2019. These two breeding grounds are separated by a minimum straight-line ocean distance of about 14,200 km—roughly the distance from Sydney to London. Because only the start and end points of the whale’s journey were documented, the actual route taken, and therefore the true distance swum, remains unknown. The other whale was first photographed in 2003 at the Abrolhos Bank—Brazil’s main humpback whale nursery off the coast of Bahia—in a large, boisterous group of nine adults. Twenty-two years later, in September 2025, it was spotted alone in Hervey Bay, Australia, representing a travel distance of 15,100 km, making this the longest distance ever documented between sightings of the same individual humpback whale on record. The study drew on 19,283 high-quality fluke photographs collected between 1984 and 2025 from eastern Australia and Latin America, contributed by both scientists and citizen scientists through the global platform Happywhale. By running these photographs through an automated image-recognition algorithm and then independently verifying every potential match by eye, the