A male humpback whale named Frodo has completed the longest-known movement for his species.
The whale swam nearly 7,000 miles from Saipan, in the Mariana Islands (on the western side of the Pacific), to Sayulita, Mexico (on the eastern side of the Pacific), according to a new study published in Endangered Species Research. This record-breaking ocean journey shows that whale migration patterns are more complex than we thought.
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 2010 and 2013, and that Russian scientists had named him Frodo after the Lord of the Rings character who undertakes an epic quest, reports National Geographic.
Not only did Frodo set the distance record, he’s also confounded the conventional wisdom of what's regarded as a humpback’s typical migration pattern, says study leader Ransome, a biologist at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.
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. Frodo, on the other hand, circumnavigated the entire North Pacific. Why?
Nobody is certain why some males make such extraordinarily long journeys away from traditional migration routes, but the prevailing theory is that they do so in order to find a mate - as competition is fiercer on traditional routes.
“It just teaches us that we can never assume too many things,” says Heidi Pearson, a marine biologist at the University of Alaska Southeast.
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