Clarifying the mechanistic drivers underlying movements of wide-ranging species is a multifaceted and challenging endeavor given the noisiness of environmental gradients inherent to natural systems (11, 63). While we demonstrate that memory of climatological resource waves may lead whales to historically productive foraging areas, blue whales likely also fine-tune their movements at finer spatial scales in response to local, proximate conditions to locate individual prey patches. At subbasin scales, baleen whales are hypothesized to use a combination of social and sensory information to locate prey (64); however, substantial knowledge gaps remain. In addition, exogenous cues or endogenous factors, such as body condition, may play a role in other aspects of migratory behavior, such as whether and when migration is first initiated.