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Three whales moving in line in the clear blue sea, in the unfeasibly nonchalant manner of something that weighs 3,000 pounds. It’s a mesmeric sight made all the more extraordinary when you realise these rarely spotted mammals have finally been caught on film for the first time. It’s the sight of True’s beaked whale, which presides at depths of 3,000ft.
The footage was captured in the waters around the Portuguese Azores. The whales tend to prefer the North Atlantic ocean but have been spotted on occasion off the coast of Brazil, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The whales tend to dive for hours and surface only for a few short minutes, hence they are difficult to track, record and research. The film was taken on an educational trip with schoolchildren and it was not until they were back on land that they realised, from the GoPro footage they had captured, what they had just witnessed. They were able to identify the species from the distinctive white patch on its head that covers a region between the blowhole and the snout.
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“Suddenly this group of whales appear from nowhere and start to surround the boat,” Natacha Aguilar de Soto, a marine biologist from the University of St Andrews and the University of La Laguna on the Canary Islands, told the New Scientist. “These are whales that very few people in the world have ever seen.”
In the past, identification has been made through DNA samples taken from dead whales found in the Azores, and one stranded in the Canary Islands. The former appeared darker, with the colour stripped from it due to the lack of oxygen; however the whale in the Canaries also had a white region on its head in a different pattern. This new sighting will help researchers in their hunt for, and identification of, the True’s whale.
In a paper describing this latest spotting, the authors postulate that the scarcity of sightings might be down to “a low abundance of this species and/or a preference of this species for deep waters far from the slope, where little survey effort has been invested”. “The latter is supported by the lack of sightings of True's beaked whales in relatively nearshore deep waters on the slope of the Canary Islands, where other beaked whale species are found routinely.”
“The disjointed global distribution of True's beaked whales has led some authors to suggest that there may be some degree of genetic isolation between the populations of the southern and northern hemispheres. These authors go further and propose that more research is required in order to assess if the northern and southern populations might represent different species."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
