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Using the photo-sharing site Flickr and a personal history of studying whale photos, she identified a picture, taken in 2001 by tourist Freddy Johansen in Madagascar, of an Antarctic humpback known to scientists as number 1363. Two years earlier, researchers had spotted 1363, a female, swimming alongside another whale in Brazil. Brazil to Madagascar. That’s a distance of 6,000 miles, nearly double any documented migration by a humpback.

The discovery led to her co-authoring a paper published earlier this month in Biology Letters, and earning her the esteemed title of citizen scientist. In the process, she changed our understanding of the humpback whale.