A familiar whale has made the 5000 km (3000 miles) journey from Canada to Hawaii.
Meet Moon, the humpback whale.
Moon has migrated south toward Hawaii, which experts believe is her birthplace.
Researchers have known Moon for over a decade now. They always spot her in September of every year, whenever she appears on their radars to feed.
They were so happy when they discovered she gave birth to a calf.
This time, they weren’t celebrating.
In September 2022, the same researchers spotted Moon on her migration journey through a drone photograph. It wasn’t just Moon, though.
It was Moon with an extremely bent, S-shaped lower trunk. She was most likely hit hard by a ship during her migration journey.
“It was one of those ‘oh my God’ moments when we learned it was Moon. It’s not like she has scoliosis or something that just came out of the blue – she was struck by something pretty hard,” Janie Wray, CEO and lead researcher for BC Whales, shared. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my lifetime as a researcher.”
Wray and the researchers would lose sight of Moon, which is something they expected given her injury.
Without the use of her tail, it would be impossible to make that journey. To their surprise, Moon was spotted off the coast of Maui on December 1, 2022.
Despite everything, Moon made it.
“This migration is part of their culture, their tradition. Moon was probably born in Hawaii. And she just goes back every single year, because that’s what her mother taught her to do,” Wray said. “It’s been passed down from mother to calf. That’s likely what drove her to travel all that way with her injury.”
She was in poor shape.
However, when Moon arrived in Hawaii, she was emaciated and covered with whale lice.
She most likely used her fat stores to survive the trip down because she couldn’t feed herself.
“She didn’t bulk up enough, still migrated down, cost her apparently an awful lot of energy and she was likely wasn’t able to feed with her injury or able to bulk up and there’s no way she will make it back because down there she won’t be able to fill her tank in order to make the journey back up,” Jackie Hildering, humpback whale researcher and education lead for the Marine Education and Research Society, told Global News.
Moon needed the fat stores to survive living in Hawaii for the winter because there is no food available for whales in tropical waters.
This puts Moon in dire straits.
This broke the hearts of whale researchers even more because they knew Moon’s days have become shorter.
What’s even more heartbreaking is they can’t even help euthanize her to lessen her pain. They can’t euthanize her because they will need to administer a lot of toxic substances.
When she dies, the marine animals who feed on her remains will be poisoned.
All they can do is wait.
There’s one more thing they can do and it’s to keep reminding ship and boat drivers and crew to be careful in the ocean.
While most ship strikes are accidents, there are still some precautions that ships can take to avoid hitting whales.
“The most important thing to do is everybody needs to slow down, especially in areas where we know there are whales. It’s easy – just slow down. We have school zones. We need whale zones,” Wray requested.
Moon is off the radar once more.
As of January 2023, there has been no sighting of Moon since December 10, 2022.
Because humpbacks have been known to survive without food for a long period, there’s no telling how long Moon will live.
Learn more about Moon’s journey when you watch the video below.
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