Twenty-two years and 15,000km later: fluke discovery sets new record for humpback whale journey

Whale first photographed off the coast of Brazil in 2003 spotted off north-east Australia in September 2025 Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast A humpback whale has made a 15,000km journey from Brazil to Australia, marking what researchers believe is the longest distance ever documented between sightings of an individual humpback. The whale was first photographed in 2003 at the Abrolhos Bank, Brazil’s main humpback whale nursery, off the coast of the north-eastern state of Bahia. In September 2025, it was spotted again in Hervey Bay off the Queensland coast, representing a travel distance of about 15,100km. Stephanie Stack, a PhD candidate at Griffith University and co-author of new research published in Royal Society Open Science, said it was “extraordinary to photograph a whale that’s gone this distance – it has never happened before”. “This particular whale had not been sighted for 22 years, which is really remarkable in and of itself,” Stack said. The whale was detected in a repository of photos on the platform Happywhale, to which researchers and citizen scientists can contribute whale sightings. Th