Once A Legend
Female humpback whales off the coast of Brazil now have their pick of mates, who slap the water with their tails and jostle for attention, a scene that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago.
Driven to near-extinction in the 1980s, there are now about 35'000 humpback whales in the South Atlantic, almost half of the world's total. The warm waters off the coast of Brazil are the largest breeding ground for Southern Atlantic humpbacks. Males compete for the chance to mate, and females give birth and nurse their calves.
They also offer a bonanza to scientists who come each year to the Abrolhos archipelago off the coast of the state of Bahia to record and study hundreds of the cetaceans. Four decades ago, no one even knew there were whales in Brazil, said Enrico Marcovaldi, founder of the Humpback Whale Institute (IBJ), one of Brazil's leading organizations researching and protecting the species. The first time he saw one, he mistook it for a rock. "They were legends. We had never seen one," he told AFP.
Humpback populations have thrived since a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. The following year, Brazil banned the practice by law and later declared the Abrolhos breeding grounds a protected area. In 2014, the humpback whale was removed from Brazil's list of threatened species, and its population has continued to thrive ever since.
A pattern of white markings against the black of a humpback's tail is its fingerprint, a unique pattern that allows researchers to identify individual whales from photographs. The comparison, which once required many pairs of eyes and hours of work, can now be done in seconds by Happy Whale, an artificial intelligence platform that has already identified 8'300 Brazilian humpbacks.
The tool helped uncover a world record: one humpback identified in Brazil was spotted more than 15'000 kilometres away off Australia's east coast, according to research published in May. "We are seeing that populations in the Southern Hemisphere are much more interconnected than we imagined," said research coordinator Milton Marcondes.