[Animals] Frodo's epic journey through the world: a humpback whale that crossed half the planet

[FNX Magokiler]

A battle-scarred male humpback whale named Frodo just completed the longest known journey for his species, a new study claims.

Between 2017 and 2018, the animal swam about 11,000 kilometers from Saipan in the Mariana Islands to Sayulita, Mexico, according to a new study published in Endangered Species Research. The previous record was held by a female humpback who swam just over 10,000 km from Brazil to Madagascar in 2001.

When biologist Nico Ransome delved into the male's astonishing trans-Pacific journey, she discovered that he had also appeared near Russia's Commander Islands in 2010 and 2013, and that Russian scientists had named him Frodo after the Lord of the Rings character. who embarks on an epic quest.

Frodo has not only broken the distance record, but has also turned the narrative on its head about what we thought typical humpback migration patterns are like, says study leader Ransome, a biologist at Murdoch University in Perth. (Australia) and founder of La Orca de Sayulita, a whale watching and research company.

The vast majority of the estimated 7,500 humpback whales that breed in western Mexico migrate north to Alaska and Canada to feed during the summers. Frodo, on the other hand, circumnavigated the entire North Pacific and, as Ransome would discover, he is not alone.

"I've been obsessed with whale migration for years," Ransome says. "To find out that some of them are going to Russia... it's mind-blowing."

 

 

(Related: Humpback whales face major setback from climate change)

A regular route
A few years ago, Ransome began noticing the presence of Russian whales in Mexico. Ransome identifies the animals through an online database called Happywhale, which keeps track of 30,000 humpback whales with black and white fin patterns as unique as a human's fingerprint.

"It's like Facebook for whales," says study co-author Ted Cheeseman, a biologist at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia, who co-founded Happywhale in 2015. Hundreds of scientists and dozens of whale-watching companies use the Facebook database. data, which has a 97 to 99 percent accuracy rate for identifying humpbacks, Cheeseman says.

Study co-author Marie Hill, a biologist at the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, shared the photo she took of Frodo in the Marianas in 2017 on Happywhale. She says such "open collaboration is key to understanding how breeding and feeding grounds are doing." connected, which is critical for the protection and conservation of humpback whales."

Frodo's novel voyages prompted Ransome, Hill, Cheeseman and their colleagues to delve into Happywhale's archives to see if other humpbacks made transpacific migrations. They found 117 specimens that migrated from Mexico to feeding areas in Russia between 1998 and 2021. Before this research, only 11 whales had been sighted in both Russia and Mexico.

People have sighted more than a third of these Russian whales in multiple years in Mexico's breeding areas. Since 2021, Ransome has documented several more Russian whales in Mexico, including mothers with calves, meaning Frodo's seemingly strange migration is probably a regular route.

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.es/animales