Tourist spots something strange lurking in ocean below plane — it was a rare creature

Moira Ritter
·2 min read
141

Francesca Emm was recently flying over the Great Barrier Reef near Whitsunday Islands when something peculiar caught her eye.

Beneath her plane, a white spot disrupted the vivid blue of the ocean. Emm took her camera out and started recording.

She sent her video to the White Whale Research Center, and sure enough — she had caught a glimpse of an incredibly rare all-white humpback whale, according to a June 16 post by the center on Twitter.

“It was definitely swimming,” Emm told the center, another tweet said. “We were heading North East and it was heading the same direction as us!”

White whales are extremely rare, Vanessa Pirotta, a whale expert at Macquarie University, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

“There’s only a handful of white whales and people are fascinated by them, because they look different,” she told the news outlet.

One white whale is particularly famous in Australia: Migaloo.

“I’ve seen Migaloo,” Pirotta told ABC. “He’s like an iceberg underwater; there is something magnificent about seeing this wide, illuminating animal underwater.”

In 1991, an all-white whale was captured on camera in Byron Bay, according to a website dedicated to Migaloo. At the time, it was the only documented creature of its kind.

The whale was soon named Migaloo, which is the name the Australian Aboriginal community in Queensland uses for “white fella,” the site said. Over the past two decades, experts have studied Migaloo by tracking his location and testing his skin for DNA.

However, the beloved creature has not been spotted since 2020, leaving some experts concerned that he might have died, according to 9 News.

Pirotta said there isn’t enough evidence yet to determine whether the white whale in Emm’s video is Migaloo.

“It does not provide us with the amount of information we would require to identify Migaloo,” she told 9 News. “It could be him or possibly another white-ish whale as part of this east Australian humpback whale population.”

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