A gray whale has swum the longest distance ever recorded in a marine vertebrate—more than 16,700 miles—over halfway around the world. The male cetacean, spotted off Namibia in 2013, is the first gray whale ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. But it took several years of genetic research to confirm the whale originated in the North Pacific, according to a study published today in the journal Biology Letters.
There are two known populations of gray whales: eastern gray whales, whose numbers are stable, with around 20,500 individuals, and western gray whales, which are endangered, with an estimated 200 individualsleft in the wild, mostly due to decades of commercial whaling...
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