Photographers off South Africa ID’d 304 individual humpback whales in a single day, the largest verified count of large whales in recorded history.
Key Takeaways
Super-groups are defined as 20+ humpbacks within five body-lengths; South Africa sightings jumped from 10 to 65 per year between 2015 and 2020.
Ted Cheeseman (Happywhale) estimates the majority of the 372 whales photographed over two days are under 10 years old – a literally new population cohort.
Industrial whaling cut humpbacks to under 5% of pre-whaling numbers; southern hemisphere populations now recover at up to 12% per year since the 1986 moratorium.
Happywhale uses AI image recognition on tail fluke and dorsal fin photos to ID individuals across a 1.5-million-image dataset, enabling citizen-science population tracking at scale.
Coordinated bubble-net feeding breaks down in super-groups into lunge feeding mayhem; researchers call it “controlled chaos” – the whales still know what they’re doing.
