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Whale Migration: The Month-by-Month Map

Great whales travel thousands of kilometres each year between cold and warm waters. Pick a month to see where they are.

109 spots
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The pattern is the same for humpback, gray and right whales: summer at high latitudes, where krill and small fish are abundant, and winter in warm shallow water where calves are born too lean to survive the cold. In between, these animals fast for months and live off their reserves. The hemispheres mirror each other: when North Pacific humpbacks head down to Hawaii in December, southern ones are moving towards Antarctica. The blue whale is the exception: its movements are less regular and its breeding grounds remain poorly known, which the map reflects as a more scattered spread.

The spots on this map

Every point below is a listed destination. Those with a published guide are clickable.

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