The humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) was first spotted by local resident Brayden Blake, aged 16, who was surfing. When Blake fell off his board, he heard whales singing underwater.
Upon returning to shore, Blake immediately spotted a white whale and ran home to retrieve the drone carrying the camera. The young surfer then managed to record a video of the humpback swimming with a herd of dolphins.
“I’ve seen a common humpback whale before, but this one was nowhere to be seen. Every time I come back to breathe air, it’s white,” Blake told The Guardian quoted by SINDOnews from the Live Science page, Wednesday (27/4/2022).
Read also; Miraculously, Humpback Whales Live After 4 Hours Of Killer Whale Attack
Blake said the white humpback whale finally disappeared after about 20 minutes of diving into the ocean depths. The encounter was a “once in a lifetime,” he said.
This white humpback whale resembles the famous Migaloo, a male albino humpback whale that was first seen in Queensland, Australia in 1981. (Migaloo means “white man” in the language of the Aboriginal community living near where the albino whale was found).
However, the new white humpback whale is smaller than the Migaloo and has patches of gray in color, while the Migaloo is completely white. Therefore, experts suspect, this is most likely the second white humpback whale from the same population.
“This is the first time I can say that the white whale I saw could be a white whale other than Migaloo. This is a very rare occurrence,” Wally Franklin, a marine ecologist at Southern Cross University in Australia who has studied Migaloo since then. 1982, to the Australian news site Nine News.
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