There's No Place Like Home, Even For Whale Sharks

FORT LAUDERDALE (CBSMiami) – There's no place like home, even for whale sharks. Two whale sharks, "Milo" and "Lucho" have traveled nearly 10-thousand miles combined and now both have returned to the same area where they were tagged last summer.

According to the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation and Nova Southeastern University's Guy Harvey Research Institute, Milo and Lucho were tagged by biologist Rafael de la Parra near Isla Mujures, Mexico last summer.

After being tagged, the whales made long, nomadic journeys but both have returned and are now swimming in the same place they were originally tagged nearly eight months ago.

WATCH: Lucho and Milo

Both sharks were tagged with fin mounted satellite SPOT tags in an unprecedented feat – while de la Parra swam with them underwater.

Milo's journey is the longer of the two, first swimming east deep into the Atlantic Ocean past Bermuda and returning near the tagging site in February 2019. Then Milo took a month-long excursion into the Gulf of Mexico, returning close to the tagging site once again, logging more than 7,000 miles.

WATCH: Lucho and Milo's Journey

Lucho, on the other hand, has had a shorter voyage. He left in late August on a 2,713-mile swim through the waters surrounding the Cayman Islands, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and the Turks and Caicos Islands before turning around and travelling to the coast of Honduras. From there, he made his way home to the tagging site by Isla Mujeres in late December. Three months later, he is still there.

"Tagging these whale sharks on their fins with SPOT tags was a scientific coup," said Mahmood Shivji, Ph.D., the director of NSU's GHRI and a professor in the university's Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography. "Rafael did an incredible job getting this done. The direct satellite communicating technology of these SPOT tags provide much more accurate tracks of the shark migrations compared to the traditionally used, data archival satellite tags, which have a lot more positional error associated with them."

Whale sharks are the world's largest shark species and are currently on the endangered species list, so revealing migration behavior allows scientists to better understand, conserve, monitor and effectively manage shark populations.

A whale shark study by the GHRI and the Maldives Whale Shark Research Programme in 2018 showed whale sharks can live as long as 130 years and may grow as large as 61.7 feet on average, which is nearly 17 feet longer than a school bus and three times the length of a Great White shark.

The ongoing journeys of these and other whale sharks can be followed online in near real-time at www.GHRItracking.org