A rare spade-toothed whale after it was found washed ashore in the second week of July 2024 on a beach near Otago, New Zealand.
| Photo Credit: AP
The spade-toothed whales are the world’s rarest, with no live sightings ever recorded. No one knows how many there are, what they eat, or even where they live in the vast expanse of the southern Pacific Ocean. However, scientists in New Zealand may have finally caught a break.
The country’s conservation agency said Monday a creature that washed up on a South Island beach this month is believed to be a spade-toothed whale. The five-meter-long creature, a type of beaked whale, was identified after it washed ashore on Otago Beach by its colour patterns and the shape of its skull, beak, and teeth.
“We know very little, practically nothing” about the creatures, Hannah Hendriks, Marine Technical Advisor for the Department of Conservation, told the Associated Press. “This is going to lead to some amazing science and world-first information.”
If the cetacean is confirmed to be the elusive spade-toothed whale, it would be the first specimen found in a state that would permit scientists to dissect it, allowing them to map the relationship of the whale to the few others of the species found, learn what it eats, and perhaps lead to clues about where they live.
Only six other spade-toothed whales have ever been pinpointed, and those found intact on New Zealand’s North Island beaches had been buried before DNA testing could verify their identification, Hendriks said, thwarting any chance to study them.
This time, the beached whale was quickly transported to cold storage, and researchers will work with local Maori iwi (tribes) to plan how it will be examined, the conservation agency said.
New Zealand’s Indigenous people consider whales a taonga — a sacred treasure — of cultural significance. In April, Pacific Indigenous leaders signed a treaty recognising whales as “legal persons,” although such a declaration is not reflected in the laws of participating nations.
Nothing is currently known about the whales’ habitat. The creatures deep-dive for food and likely surface so rarely that it has been impossible to narrow their location further than the southern Pacific Ocean, home to some of the world’s deepest ocean trenches, Hendriks said.
“It’s very hard to do research on marine mammals if you don’t see them at sea,” she said. “It’s a bit of a needle in a haystack. You don’t know where to look.” The conservation agency said the genetic testing to confirm the whale’s identification could take months.
It took “many years and a mammoth amount of effort by researchers and local people” to identify the “incredibly cryptic” mammals, Kirsten Young, a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter who has studied spade-toothed whales, said in emailed remarks.
The fresh discovery “makes me wonder — how many are out in the deep ocean and how do they live?” Young said.
