A tissue sample from the carcass later showed that the whale was one of the newly identified species.
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Japanese whalers call the enigmatic black whales “karasu”, the Japanese word for raven.
Joshua Prokopiof and Hertha Kaschaverof documenting the new species of beaked whale at St. George Island in June 2014.
“The challenge in documenting the species was simply locating enough specimens to provide convincing evidence”, Morin said in a statement. Above we see an all-black caiman sneaking its way toward prey, or toward the electronics aisle for the latest new game. For the clarity, tissues samples were sent to the Marine Mammal and Turtle Division of NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in California.
The researchers still don’t know much about the new species. This got Morin’s attention. The differences, in fact, are so dramatic that the animal has to be something else, they say.
The new species is yet to be named and its features described in a scientific study. Then he and his colleagues pursued additional DNA samples from museums, research institutions and Japanese markets where whale meat is sold.
The findings have revealed that evidence of the whale already existed – a whale skeleton in a nearby high school belongs to the species, as does another at the Smithsonian.
The only skeleton of the new species in the United States hangs on display in Unalaska High School, in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
This was not the first time that questions had arisen about mysterious traits in certain beaked whales; a previous analysis, published in 2013, of DNA from eight tissue specimens from Japanese and Alaskan waters had pointed to a DNA variation in whale tissue samples.
There was something odd about the whale that washed ashore St. George Island a couple summers ago, unusual enough for the group that spotted the decomposing 24-foot cetacean to tip off scientists and later to help track its location for months as Bering Sea storms pushed and pulled it along the coast.
“We don’t know how many there are, where they’re typically found, anything”, Phillip Morin, a molecular geneticist at the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center and lead author, told National Geographic. “The scientists that came across the corpse originally thought it was a Baird’s, but soon they started to realize that they couldn’t identify it, with its different dorsal fin and head shape, and darker coloration”. The whale was not a juvenile, as its teeth were worn and yellow.
Japan hunts Baird’s beaked whales, the largest of the beaked whales reaching lengths of up to 36 feet (11 meters) long. These whales have beaks which resemble those of dolphins.
“The thing about beaked whales is they’re very elusive”, Morin reportedly said, adding that the whales tend to spend a lot of time underwater and swim deeper than 3,000 feet. The new species is darker in color and about two-thirds the size of the more common Baird’s beaked whale, but so scarce that even whalers rarely see them. “And with a whale as rare as this, it’s even more hard because we just don’t have those materials”. “If you think about it, on land, discovery of new species of large mammals is exceptionally rare”. The scientists said in their article that the two known species “share a common ancestor more recently than they do with the black form”. Morin said, “Aside from that, we don’t really know”. That’s a huge amount of space to investigate….
We still have a long way to go as far as charting the depths of the oceans is concerned.
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“The whale did not match descriptions for the Baird’s”, Ridgway told local NBC affiliate KTUU. The whale was found dead in 2004, and recent tests on stored tissue samples revealed that it is one of the few known specimens of the new species.
