These Rare Whales Had Never Been Seen Alive, Then Scientists Saw Two Near California

These Rare Whales Had Never Been Seen Alive, Then Scientists Saw Two Near California

A lifelong whale researcher recently encountered a living pair of gingko-toothed beaked whales for the first time ever in the wild.

The encounter advances the science of beaked whales enormously, for in addition to confirming the whole genome of the animal, it also linked this elusive species to a well-recorded whale song that can now be used to map their territory and protect them, potentially, from hazards like military sonar.

In 2024, an expedition was conducted off northwestern Baja California, Mexico, to find and identify the beaked whale species that produced a unique echolocation pulse codenamed BW43, which had previously been recorded in the area and elsewhere in the North Pacific.

At the time, the crew, led by Oregon State University researcher Robert Pitman, believed they were searching for Perrin’s beaked whale, but they were in for a surprise. For hours the vessel, owned and operated by OSU, bobbed around on the surface of the water until a set of high-powered binoculars saw several whales surface off the starboard side.

The pair looked like juveniles surfacing and diving, and without being able to get a clear visual ID, Pitman pulled out a modified crossbow, and shot a corded bolt that extracted a piece of skin and blubber from the whale no bigger than a pencil-top eraser.

Aside from the fear that some naughty albatrosses would rob the precious cargo as it was reeled in, it was a moment of pure exhilaration. The BW43 call had been recorded, and they knew that it was almost certainly the case that whichever whales those had seen were responsible for making it.

It turned out not to be Perrin’s beaked whale, but the gingko-toothed beaked whale, which like the former, had never been seen alive in the wild before.

“I can’t even describe the feeling because it was something that we had worked towards for so long,” says Elizabeth Henderson, a researcher at the US military’s Naval Information Warfare Center and lead author of the resulting paper published in Marine Mammal Science, who was also there that day. “Everybody on the boat was cheering because we had it, we finally had it.”

Beaked whales are the most poorly understood mammals on Earth. 24 species are known to exist, and almost all of them are only known through brief surface sightings and dead specimens that have washed up on beaches.

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Little is known about any of them, other than that they are the deepest-diving of all marine mammals, and that their tusks grow out like a deer’s antlers and are used for combat. They feed on squid and can suffer from decompression sickness akin to a human diver if surfacing from their deep water dives too quickly. They don’t surface near the shore, and they don’t like boats.

Henderson had been tracking the culprit behind BW43 since 2020. The spot where they eventually made the confirmation of the gingko-toothed whale had been visited thrice before, previously with chartered fishing boats. It was only in 2024 when she partnered with OSU and Pitman that the team finally found what they were looking for. It meant Pitman had seen 90 of the 94 whale species on our planet.

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Interestingly, the gingko-toothed whales almost exclusively strand themselves or wash up dead on the other side of the Pacific—in Japan or Australia.

“There were two strandings on the west coast of North America previously, but they had always been assumed to have been anomalous—animals that washed ashore, or were sick,” Henderson told the Guardian. “But now we know that that’s not true and that they actually occupy these waters year-round.”

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