humpback whales are some of the largest creatures on earth and live in every one of the planet's oceans.

Their seasonal migrations are among the longest of any mammals, stretching thousands of miles as

they travel between tropical breeding grounds and colder feeding grounds.

Now scientists are using AI-powered facial recognition technology to track them on their journeys,

offering new insights into their habits and their health.

Even though adult humpback whales weigh as much as 40 tons and measure up to 60 feet long,

that's longer than a school bus, they can be dwarfed by the vast open waters of the oceans.

For decades, scientists tracked them by comparing photographs of their distinctive tales.

Marine biologist Ted Cheeseman.

Much like a face shows recognition features, right? The size of my nose, the size of my

chin, all that sort of thing. Underside of a humpback whale's tail has patterns and shapes and

scars that make them individually recognizable. Sifting through the thousands of photographs

from a month-long research voyage could take up to a year.

So Cheesman turned to image recognition technology to do the same thing in about two days.

He built a website called Happy Whale, where photographs can be uploaded and analyzed.

To date, scientists and the general public have submitted more than one million photos,

creating a global catalog of more than 100,000 individual whales.

Each new data point provides more insight into the whales' movements.

It's hard to grasp the scale of a whale or creature that can just casually swim from Alaska to Mexico or Hawaii every season just to find a mate and then swim back and not feed the entire time, three, four months without eating at all.

That's pretty hard to grasp. But this gets us a little closer to being able to see that.

Researchers discovered that a whale first scene in 2013 off the coast of Colombia in South America

was spotted nine years later on the other side of the globe near Zanzibar off eastern Africa.

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