Beached spade-toothed whale in New Zealand could provide clues to mysterious species

Beached spade-toothed whales are the rarest whales that inhabit the waters of the world and are never seen alive on the surface of the earth. It is still unknown how many of them exist, what do they feed on, or where they nest, in the vast area of the southern Pacific Ocean. However, the New Zealand-based scientists may have now had a lucky break.

Beached spade-toothed whale

Instead, the country’s conservation agency said Monday that a creature that washed up on a South Island beach this month is believed to be a spade-toothed whale. The five-meter-long animal belonging to the group of beaked whales was identified by the overall body colour, shape of its skull, beak, and teeth after the carcass washed ashore on Otago Beach.

‘We know very little, practically nothing,’ about the creatures, Hannah Hendriks of the Department of Conservation’s marine technical adviser said. ”This is going to lead to some amazing science and world-first information. ”
If this dead cetacean is proven to be a spade-toothed whale, this is the first hot specimen in a state where they could cut it open, That would let them chart the whale to the few others of the species known, figure out what the whale eats, and may even point to where they live.

Thus, there are only six other spade-toothed whales that have been located, and DNA identification was impossible when five specimens of the species were found washed ashore on the coasts of North Island, New Zealand; as Hendriks mentioned, they were swiftly buried, mostly burying any opportunity to research them as well.

This time the beached whale was promptly removed to the cold room, and, the decision on how to proceed further will be taken in conjunction with the local Māori iwi (tribes), said the conservation agency.

It becomes very difficult to write anything about the whale if very little information is available about it.

Maoris, New Zealand’s Indigenous people, regard whales as taonga, which is a culturally valued item. In April of this year, the Pacific Indigenous leaders signed the treaty of the whales’ personhood, though such legal status is not foreseen in the legislation of the participating countries.

About their living environment, there is no information available in the current world. The creatures plunge for prey and probably come up to breathe only once in a while, which has made it difficult to pinpoint their habitat more specifically than the southern Pacific Ocean, one of the world’s driest regions, Hendriks said.

Thus, she said it must be very difficult to research marine mammals if one does not see them in the sea. The outcome of searching for these topics is quite distant: It’s a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack—one does not know where to start.

A conservation agency said that it could take up to several months to cull a sample to establish the identity of the whale.

Beached spade-toothed whale

The scientists and locals worked long and hard for ‘many years’ before they were able to find the ‘enigmatically elusive’ mammals. Kirsten Young, a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and one of the beached spade-toothed whale researchers added this in an email.

The fresh discovery made me ask myself more questions, such as, “How many more are there in the deep ocean, and how do they survive?” Young concluded.

The first bones of the spade-toothed whale were discovered in 1872, on Pitt Island in New Zealand. A second skeleton was identified at an offshore island site during the 1950s, and the third one was recovered on Robinson Crusoe Island in Chile in 1986. In the year 2002 DNA sequencing determined that all three samples were from the same species and that it was different from other beaked whales.

This was the first time that a rare type of beached spade-toothed whale was sighted.
Scientists who were researching the mammal could not establish if the species had gone extinct. Next, in 2010, two spade-toothed whales were found beached, dead on a New Zealand beach. Initially, they were confused with the other 13 similar types of beaked whales in New Zealand; however, a tissue analysis before putting them into the burial okayed their identification.

New Zealand is considered to be one of the most tragic Beached spade-toothed whales and other large marine mammals; since 1840, more than five thousand cases of strandings have been noted, says the Department of Conservation.