griseus:STRANDED WHALE IN THE INDO-PACIFIC IS A RESURRECTS NEW SPECIES OF BEAKED WHALEBeaked whales
griseus:STRANDED WHALE IN THE INDO-PACIFIC IS A RESURRECTS NEW SPECIES OF BEAKED WHALEBeaked whales are some of the world’s most mysterious creatures. Now, after running DNA tests on a gift of dried whale meat given to a scientist visiting islands in the Pacific, researchers have confirmed that there’s a whole new species of beaked whale living in our oceansThe species, Mesoplodon hotaula, is a dark blue, Volkswagen-van-sized cetacean with the prominent snout that gives beaked whales their common name. It first came to scientists’ attention in 1963 when a single adult female stranded on the coast of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. The director of the National Museums of Ceylon, P. E. P. Deraniyagala, decided that it was different from the other Mesoplodon species known at that time, and assigned it the namehotaula, meaning “pointed beak” in the local Sinhala language. But only 2 years later, M. hotaula was eliminated as a species when other researchers decided that it was identical to M. ginkgodens (another beaked whale which scientists know only from stranded carcasses and have never seen alive in the sea)Researcher used a combination of DNA analyses and physical characteristics to identify the new species from seven specimens that were discovered in Sri Lanka, the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati), Palmyra Atoll in the Northern Line Islands near Hawai’i, the Maldives, and the Seychelles.This is not the only new beaked whale species that has come to light recently. In 2002 researchers discovered the Mesoplodon perrini beaked whale species in the North Pacific, and a year later they found the Mesoplodon traversii species in the Southern Ocean. In all, scientists recognize 22 species of beaked whales to date.Reference: Dalebout et al, 2014. Resurrection of Mesoplodon hotaula Deraniyagala 1963: A new species of beaked whale in the tropical Indo-Pacific. Marine mammal sciencePhoto: Island Conservation Society -- source link