Humpback Whale ‘Supergroups’ Show a Species Roaring Back From Whaling

For most of the year, humpback whales are relatively solitary travelers, moving alone or in small pods across vast stretches of ocean. So the sight that greeted Chris and Monique Fallows off South Africa’s west coast in December 2025 was extraordinary: a churning, spouting mass of whales feeding together. When they counted, they found 299 humpbacks gathered in a single place — a so-called “supergroup,” one of the largest such gatherings documented.

“It was extraordinary,” said Chris Fallows, a wildlife photographer who has spent decades at sea. “There must be several hundred whales coming together in one particular area.” These supergroups, in which dozens or hundreds of humpbacks converge on rich patches of krill or small fish, were essentially unheard of a generation ago. Their reappearance in the waters of the Southern Hemisphere is being read by scientists as a vivid, visible sign of a population that has come surging back.

“So the sight that greeted Chris and Monique Fallows off South Africa’s west coast in December 2025 was extraordinary: a churning, spouting mass of whales feeding together.”

The scale of that recovery is remarkable. Driven to the edge by industrial whaling in the 20th century, humpback numbers in the Southern Hemisphere fell to fewer than 10,000 animals. Today, following the international moratorium on commercial whaling, they exceed 100,000. Els Vermeulen, chief scientist at the University of Pretoria’s Whale Unit, did not mince words about what made the difference: “In general, the moratorium on whaling can be classified as one of the strongest conservation success stories.”

The recovery is being tracked in part through platforms such as Happywhale, which uses the unique markings on whales’ tails to identify individuals over time, aided by coordinators like Alex Vogel of Happywhale Africa. Scientists caution that humpbacks still face modern hazards, from ship strikes to shifting food supplies driven by a changing climate. But the supergroups off South Africa tell a story worth pausing on: a giant of the ocean, hunted to near-oblivion within living memory, is once again gathering in numbers large enough to stretch across the horizon — proof of what protection, given time, can achieve.