The One

You don't know what tomorrow hold you, so don't look down on anybody

In 2001, a humpback whale was swimming off the coast of Sydney, Australia when a boat's propeller tore into her back and tail fluke, leaving 30-centimeter-deep gashes across her body. By any measure, the wounds should have been fatal. Somehow, she survived.

Researchers named her Bladerunner.

The scars she carries are unlike anything marine scientists typically document. Deep, parallel cuts run along her left side and right tail fluke, the kind of injury that leaves no ambiguity about what caused it. "It's a really distinct, really traumatic injury that has been inflicted by human activity," said Duane March, marine wildlife team leader at the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service.

In the years that followed, Bladerunner was spotted multiple times along Australia's eastern coast, each sighting confirming what seemed almost impossible: she was alive, healthy, and continuing to migrate along the route humpback whales have followed for thousands of years.

Photographer Tracey Harris captured Bladerunner on camera off the coast of Eden, New South Wales, when she noticed something peculiar through her lens. "I kept photographing her and she kept moving just on the surface of the water and then her back came up even higher, so I kept the focus on her, and then the tail came up and that's when I saw the chunks out of her," Harris said. "I can't even imagine how she survived it to be honest. She's a miracle whale."

March describes her story as bittersweet. "Bitter in the fact that it's unfortunate the animal had to go through what it went through as a result of human activity. But sweet in the fact that it's awesome the animal has healed and lived 20 years on and it's still going about and doing its thing. It's a real testament to the resilience of the animals."

Bladerunner is not alone in carrying these kinds of scars. Split Fin, a well-known killer whale in the same waters, has a split dorsal fin almost certainly caused by a boat propeller, first spotted in 2003. Their injuries tell a broader story about what is happening beneath the surface of the world's oceans every single day.

An estimated 20,000 vessel strikes on whales occur every year globally, though experts believe the true number is far higher since most go undetected and unreported. Whales need to surface regularly to breathe, placing them directly in the path of boats moving through increasingly busy shipping lanes. Despite their enormous size, they are extraordinarily difficult to spot from the bridge of a large vessel, particularly when submerged just below the surface.

Humpback whales have made a remarkable recovery since commercial whaling was banned worldwide, growing from a global population of approximately 5,000 in the 1960s to around 135,000 today. But vessel strikes now represent one of the most significant ongoing threats to their continued recovery, alongside entanglement in fishing gear and ocean noise pollution.

"That could really spell potential extinction for some of these species," said Chloe Robinson, director of whales for Ocean Wise.

Bladerunner's story sits at the intersection of all of those contradictions. She is a survivor of human activity, documented by humans, celebrated by humans, while the conditions that nearly killed her continue to threaten her species every migration season.

Her scars have not faded. They are as visible today as they were the first time a researcher's camera found them, a permanent record of one moment when a boat and a whale occupied the same water at the same time and only one of them felt it.

Every time researchers spot her still swimming along the humpback highway off Australia's eastern coast, she carries the evidence of what humans can do to the creatures that share our planet, and the extraordinary will of those creatures to survive it anyway.

Messi is a goat

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