Ecology has been found
The world's rarest whale, which was previously known solely for its bones, was first seen on a New Zealand beach, according to a new article in Current Biology. This elusive marine mammal of the cetacean family is the beak whale Mesoplodon traversii.
The good news is that this animal has been seen by humans at all, meaning it actually exists today. The bad news is that the whale washed ashore turned out to be a female, with a male cub also found next to her. Both animals ran aground and died on the shore.
“This is the first time we have seen this species of animals, as they say, in its entirety. They are about 5 meters long,” says Rochelle Constantine from the University of Auckland. “So far, we've got everything we knew about these beak-nosed whales from three skulls found in New Zealand and Chile over a period of 140 years. It is very strange that we have so little information about such large marine mammals.”
The world of marine animals surprises a lot
This discovery actually took place two years ago, when a whale and a kitten washed up on the shore of Opap Beach in New Zealand. It was only after thorough research and DNA analysis that it was possible to establish that these animals belong to a rare species. At first, they were misidentified and mistaken for a more common species, Gray's belt tooth.
“When the samples were brought to our lab, we extracted their DNA, as we usually do with similar samples. We were quite surprised when we found that these were Mesoplodon traversii beak whales,” Konstantin said. “We double-checked everything several times to make sure we were right again.”
Konstantin suspects that these marine animals live quite far from the coast in the open ocean and are very rarely thrown to the coast. As you know, New Zealand is surrounded by spacious and deep oceans, where there are still many animals unknown to science.
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