The underwater year
Migrations
The classic long-distance migrator: polar feeding grounds in summer, tropical breeding grounds in winter — the year’s clearest ocean rhythm.
See humpback whale dive sites · zoom in and select a glow to open that coast on the dive map
How to read this map
Each glow is a 2°-cell density of recorded observations for the selected species in that calendar month, pooled across years of open data. Brighter means more records — which reflects both where animals are andwhere people look for them. Sightings are history, not a forecast: a bright bloom is strong planning context for “when to go”, never a guarantee of an encounter, and never a statement about dive conditions or safety.
Where the data comes from
Occurrence records are accessed through GBIF — the Global Biodiversity Information Facility — pooling museum-grade surveys, tagging programs, and citizen science. We include only records published under CC0 or CC BY 4.0, filter out records with coordinate problems, and, in very dense months, sample records evenly across latitude bands (the map notes when a month is sampled). Data © the contributing dataset publishers; see our data sources & attribution page.
From bloom to dive plan
Zoom in and select any glow to open that stretch of coast on the dive-site map, or start from the species: whale shark, scalloped hammerhead, giant oceanic manta ray, ocean sunfish, orca, humpback whale, green sea turtle, tiger shark, great white shark, reef manta ray, thresher sharks, bull shark.