The longest whale journey ever recorded links Australia to Brazil An international team has documented humpback whales making record-breaking crossings between eastern Australia and Brazil, with one individual confirmed travelling 15,100 kilometres - the longest movement ever recorded for the species. An international research team has documented humpback whales travelling more than 14,000 kilometres across open ocean, crossing between breeding populations in eastern Australia and Brazil. The findings, published in Royal Society Open Science, represent the longest confirmed movements ever recorded for the species. The breakthrough was made possible by comparing tens of thousands of photographs of whale flukes – the distinctive tail markings that act as a natural fingerprint for individual animals. Drawing on a dataset of 19,283 high-quality fluke images collected between 1984 and 2025 from eastern Australia and Latin America, the team used automated image-recognition software to identify potential matches before independently verifying each one by eye. The photographs were contributed by both professional scientists and citizen scientists via the global platform Happywhale. From nearly 20,000 individual whales spanning more than four decades of data, two animals emerged as having crossed between the two regions – a figure representing just 0.01% of identified individuals. The first whale was photographed in Hervey Bay, Queensland in 2007, resighted in the same area in 2013, and then recorded off the coast of São Paulo, Brazil in 2019. The straight-line ocean distance between those two breeding grounds is approximately 14,200 kilometres – roughly equivalent to the distance from Sydney to London. The second case involved a whale first photographed in 2003 at the Abrolhos Bank, Brazil’s primary humpback nursery off the coast of Bahia, within a boisterous group of nine adults. Some 22 years later – in September 2025 – the same animal was spotted alone in Hervey Bay, Australia, marking