World’s oldest humpback whale celebrates 53 years despite population decline

Dr. Adam A. Pack, a marine mammal researcher at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, has made a remarkable discovery.

A humpback whale's tail is as distinctive as a fingerprint, with each whale sporting unique scalloped flukes and a one-of-a-kind black-and-white pattern on the underside, Caliber.Az reports citing the foreign media.

When Adam A. Pack, a marine mammal researcher at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, was photographing whales in Alaska’s Frederick Sound this July, he immediately recognized a familiar fluke.

The tail in question belonged to Old Timer, a whale first spotted in 1972 and now at least 53 years old. This makes Old Timer the oldest known humpback whale in the world, according to Dr. Pack, who is also the co-founder and president of The Dolphin Institute.

Humpback whale populations, once ravaged by commercial whaling, have shown a remarkable recovery in recent decades. However, these majestic creatures still face significant threats from ship strikes, fishing gear entanglements, and climate change. Dr. Pack had been particularly concerned about Old Timer, especially after the whale was last seen in 2015 during a devastating heat wave that led to the death of numerous seabirds and marine mammals.

Seeing Old Timer again after nine years was a deeply moving moment for Dr. Pack. “It was heartwarming to see that not all of the older whales had succumbed,” he said. “Some of them have shown remarkable resilience.”

But then it dropped sharply. This population decline coincided with the severe marine heat wave, when Dr. Pack last spotted Old Timer. It lasted from 2014 to 2016 and slashed the supply of fish and krill. “There’s a lot more we want to learn about the event, but it is quite clear: warmer waters mean food is less available overall, and what is available is more dispersed and deeper,” Mr. Cheeseman said in an email.

Historically, tracking humpback whales involved painstaking work: scientists manually compared new photos of whale flukes with old ones to identify individuals. However, advancements in technology are set to transform this process. Dr. Adam A. Pack, a marine mammal researcher at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, is looking forward to leveraging artificial intelligence to accelerate studies on humpbacks like Old Timer. This innovation could reveal how and why certain whales are able to endure challenging conditions.

Humpback whales in the North Pacific, including Old Timer, migrate between breeding grounds in Hawaii and feeding areas in southeastern Alaska. This migration has been closely monitored since 1976, thanks to pioneering work by marine mammal researcher Louis Herman, who began photographing these whales and their unique flukes. His extensive collection of over 30,000 fluke images has provided crucial insights into whale behavior, migration patterns, and social structures.

The study of these majestic creatures is now entering a new era with the advent of machine learning. The online platform Happywhale is revolutionizing whale tracking by collecting fluke photos from scientists and the public worldwide. With approximately 1.1 million images of over 100,000 individual humpbacks, Happywhale’s AI-powered photo matching algorithms help automatically identify whales, streamlining the process of tracking and studying them.

Ted Cheeseman, a co-founder of Happywhale and a Ph.D. candidate at Southern Cross University, highlights that this technology has significantly enhanced large-scale collaborations and research capabilities. Earlier this year, Cheeseman, Dr. Pack, and other researchers used Happywhale’s tools to estimate the abundance of humpback whales in the North Pacific from 2002 to 2021. The data revealed a significant population increase, reaching about 33,500 whales by 2012.

This technological leap promises to deepen our understanding of humpback whales and their resilience, offering new opportunities to study their lives and behaviors in unprecedented detail.

Dr. Adam A. Pack, a marine mammal researcher at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, is not just celebrating the remarkable survival of Old Timer, a humpback whale he had first spotted in 1972. He is also driven by a profound question: Why did Old Timer, at 53 years old, manage to survive when so many other humpbacks faced severe declines?

The Hawaii humpback population experienced a significant 34 per cent drop between 2013 and 2021. While Old Timer had been sighted occasionally after 2015, Dr. Pack's recent sighting provided a crucial opportunity to explore why this particular whale made it through the tough years. With the support of Happywhale, an advanced online platform that utilizes artificial intelligence for whale tracking, Dr. Pack aims to delve deeper into the resilience of humpbacks during periods of scarcity.

Dr. Pack is curious to determine if Old Timer's advanced age might have played a role in his survival. "It is possible that Old Timer has developed adaptability over the years, allowing him to endure when food resources were scarce," Dr. Pack speculates. However, this remains an area of speculation. The question now is whether Old Timer's resilience is an anomaly or if other whales shared similar survival traits.

The ongoing research will seek to uncover patterns and factors that contributed to the survival of whales like Old Timer, potentially offering insights into how humpbacks adapt to environmental challenges. This inquiry into the survival strategies of long-lived whales could provide valuable information for the conservation of humpback populations and the broader marine ecosystem.