Since 2021, Ransome has documented several more Russian whales in Mexico, including mothers with calves-meaning Frodo’s seemingly odd migration is likely a regular route. People spotted more than one-third of these Russian whales in multiple years in Mexico’s breeding areas. Prior to this research, only 11 whales had been sighted in both Russia and Mexico. They found 117 individuals that migrated from Mexico to feeding areas in Russia between 19. Unauthorized use is prohibited.įrodo’s novel journeys spurred Ransome, Hill, Cheeseman, and their colleagues to dig into Happywhale’s archives to see whether other humpbacks were making trans-Pacific migrations. She says such “open collaboration is key to understanding how the breeding and feeding grounds are connected, which is critical for the protection and conservation of humpback whales.” (Read how humpback whales may face a major setback due to climate change.) 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. Hundreds of scientists and dozens of whale-watching companies use the database, which has a 97 to 99 percent accuracy rate for identifying humpbacks, Cheeseman says. 'It’s like Facebook for whales,” says study co-author T ed Cheeseman, a biologist at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia, who co-founded Happywhale in 2015. She identifies individual animals via an online whale-identification database called Happywhale, which keeps a log of 30,000 humpbacks’ black-and-white fluke patterns that are as unique as a human’s fingerprint. “To find out that some of them go to Russia-I mean, it's mind-blowing.” A regular routeĪ few years ago, Ransome started noticing Russian whales showing up in Mexico. “I've been obsessed with whale migration for years,” says Ransome. (Read about a gray whale that set the record for longest migration of a marine vertebrate.)

Frodo, on the other hand, circumnavigated the entire North Pacific-and, as Ransome would discover, he’s not alone. The vast majority of the estimated 7,500 humpbacks that breed off western Mexico migrate north to Alaska and Canada to feed during the summers. Not only did Frodo set the distance record, he’s also flipped the script on what we think of as a humpback’s typical migration patterns, says study leader Ransome, a biologist at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, and founder of La Orca de Sayulita, a whale watch and research company. When biologist Nico Ransome delved deeper into the male’s astonishing trans-Pacific journey, she discovered it had also appeared near Russia’s Commander Islands in 20, and that Russian scientists had named him Frodo after the Lord of the Rings character who undertakes an epic quest. A female humpback that swam just over 6,000 miles from Brazil to Madagascar in 2001 held the previous record. A battle-scarred male humpback whale named Frodo has completed the longest- known movement for his species, a new study says.īetween 20, the animal swam nearly 7,000 miles from Saipan, in the Mariana Islands, to Sayulita, Mexico, according to a new study published in Endangered Species Research.

Humpback whale singing