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Under Melbourne’s busiest freeway, a couple of commuters took the scenic route into the city – two humpback whales, moseying under the West Gate Bridge for the first time in living memory.
The duo was spotted on Tuesday on Ports Victoria’s traffic cameras that monitor the Yarra River, the grainy stills showing the whales’ breaching fins, just enough to make drivers do a double take.
The humpback whale pair was spotted under the West Gate Bridge.
It is not uncommon for whales to frolic at the top end of Port Phillip Bay, near Williamstown and Port Melbourne, and even at the mouth of the Yarra River, Dolphin Research Institute research officer David Donnelly said.
“But to get up to the bridge is not something we’ve got a record of previously,” Donnelly said.
“Our records are well-kept for the last 10 years but sporadically date back to [1984]. We have quite a long history of visits of those animals.”
Whale visits to Port Phillip Bay vary from year to year. Hardly any of the animals appeared in the bay in 2024, compared with multiple visits a few years ago and again this year, Donnelly said.
“It looks like it’s the same whales that have been hanging around the top end of the bay since just before Sunday. So we’ve been having them coming up and down the eastern seaboard, but they’ve also been in Corio Bay, and down through to Point Cook,” Donnelly said.
The research officer, who founded the Victorian whale sightings citizen science project Two Bays Whale Project, said he and his colleagues were working to verify the humpback whale pair’s path.
The number of whales in the bay each year could vary cyclically, but that was difficult to determine without an adequate number of photos – and particularly, high-quality ones – to identify individual whales and their behaviours, Donnelly said.
“[If this humpback whale pair comes] back to the bay every year, then we could say it’s not unexpected that this animal would come and go,” Donnelly said.
“Reporting the sightings is really important if we want to answer [these] questions.
“We currently hold the largest data set for large whales in Victorian waters, and we’ve just recently written a report to inform decision-making around offshore developments based on that stuff that people have been giving us.”
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Melburnians can report whale and dolphin sightings to the Dolphin Research Institute via the PodWatch platform, Donnelly said.
The Conservation Regulator Victoria urge Melburnians to maintain safe distances from whales: 50 metres for swimmers and surfers, 200 metres for boats, 300 metres for jet skis and 500 vertical metres for aircraft, including drones.
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