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Do whales live in Lake Michigan? The short answer: No. The long answer: Still no; but a series of mistakes, pranks, and hoaxes have led some people to believe that the sixth largest freshwater lake in the world is home to some of the largest mammals on earth. Let's start in 1985, when the ship Charlotte Ann set sail on the first annual Great Lakes Whale Watch. While Tom and Chris Kastle, the event's organizers, insisted that they were legitimately searching for whales on Lake Michigan, their tongue-in-cheek comments to the Chicago Tribune revealed that the true nature of the event was simply to raise awareness about the plight of whales: The first annual Great Lakes Whale Watch didn't result in any whale sightings, but it did contribute a chapter to the story about Lake Michigan's secret population of whales. The next major event in this saga occurred in 2002 when Michigan Studies Weekly, a newspaper distributed to 462 teachers in the state of Michigan, mistakenly reported that whales were living in the Great Lakes. While some teachers relayed this misinformation to their students, others questioned the report, which led to the paper's publishing a retraction: That brings us to 2015, when another rumor about Lake Michigan whales began circulating online courtesy of the Lake Michigan Whale Migration Station (LMWMS) Facebook group. Although the LMWMS's Facebook page does not include a disclaimer, we heeded the lesson of Michigan Studies Weekly's experience and took a closer look at the site. What we found upon further inspection was that the Lake Michigan Whale Migration Station does not actually track whale sightings in Lake Michigan. Instead, the group shares digitally manipulated and misattributed photos of whales:
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