Peripatetic Whale

On the move! But I'm wondering: there was that grey whale recently that ended up off the coast of Israel. Maybe these long trips are more common than we realize:

LONDON — It wasn't love. It could have been adventure. Or maybe she just got lost. It remains a mystery why a female humpback whale swam thousands of miles from the reefs of Brazil to the African island of Madagascar, which researchers believe is the longest single trip ever undertaken by a mammal -- humans excluded.

While humpbacks normally migrate along a north-to-south axis to feed and mate, this one -- affectionately called AHWC No. 1363 -- made the unusual decision to check out a new continent thousands of miles to the east.

...Stevick laid out the details of the whale's trip on Wednesday in the Royal Society's Biology Letters, calculating that, at a minimum, the whale must have traveled about 6,200 miles to get from Brazil to Madagascar, off the coast of east Africa.

"No other mammal has been seen to move between two places that are further apart," said Stevick, who works at the Maine-based College of the Atlantic. And while he said "the distance alone would make it exceptional no matter where it had gone," there was an added element of interest.

Humpbacks are careful commuters, taking the same trip from cold waters where they hunt plankton, fish and krill to warm waters where they mingle and mate "year after year after year," he said. The location of their feeding and breeding spots sometimes varies, but their transoceanic commute doesn't usually change much.

Swapping a breeding ground in Brazil for one in Madagascar was previously unheard of.

"That's almost 90 degrees of longitude -- so a quarter of the way around the globe," Stevick said. "Not only is this an exception, but it's a really remarkable exception at that."