The spade-toothed whale is among the rarest and least-studied of whales. Until recently, only six records of the species existed, collected over the past 150 years. In early December, scientists and Indigenous Māori cultural experts in Aotearoa New Zealand documented the seventh in unprecedented detail, conducting the first ever dissection of this cryptic cetacean. They uncovered numerous new findings, with more expected as the analysis proceeds, and reaffirmed Māori cultural connections to whales while exchanging Western and Indigenous understandings of the animals. “This one is the rarest of the rare, only the seventh specimen known from anywhere in the world, and the first opportunity we have had to undertake a dissection like this,” Anton van Helden, senior marine science adviser with New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, who led the dissection, said in a Dec. 2 news release. “Most of what we know about these elusive whales comes from the examination of whales that have come ashore and died.” ‘Rarest of the rare’ Spade-toothed whales (Mesoplodon traversii) belong to a cetacean family known as the beaked whales for their protruding snouts. Beaked whales (family Ziphiidae) have small flippers that they tuck alongside their bodies while diving deep to forage for squid and small fish throughout the world’s oceans. They can remain underwater for long periods, which makes them difficult to study and earned them a reputation as some of the most enigmatic large mammals on Earth. While 13 of the 22 recognized species of beaked whales are known to strand along…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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