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The carcass of a spade-toothed whale, the world’s rarest whale, has washed up on a beach in New Zealand. The whale is so rare that no living individual has ever been seen.
The whale’s carcass washed up on the coast of the country’s South Island, the New Zealand Department of Conservation said.
The carcass of an extremely rare spade-toothed whale has washed up on the shores of New Zealand (Photo: Getty).
The whale’s carcass, measuring 5m long, was in good enough condition for scientists to dissect it to further study the whale’s biology, as well as determine how it is related to other whale species.
“We know very little, if anything, about this species,” said Hannah Hendriks, an adviser to the New Zealand Department of Conservation. “The carcass will help scientists learn some of the world’s first information about this species.”
The spade-toothed whale is so rare that scientists have not yet been able to determine its distribution and habitat, nor do they know its diet or biological characteristics.
However, scientists still have to do careful research to confirm whether the carcass that washed ashore in New Zealand recently was indeed a spade-toothed whale, or belonged to another species of whale.
Only six spade-toothed whales had ever been recorded by humans, but all of them died and washed up on New Zealand beaches. No survivors have ever been recorded by humans.
However, the bodies of previous spade-toothed whales were buried before scientists had a chance to study them thoroughly, depriving them of the opportunity to dissect and learn more about the species’ biology.
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The carcass of a rare whale species is taken to cold storage (Video: Twitter).
New Zealand scientists learned from previous experiences and immediately moved the newly discovered spade-toothed whale to cold storage and planned an autopsy to thoroughly study the animal’s biological characteristics.
Scientists say it will take months, even years, to carefully study and deduce biological characteristics of this rarest whale species.
“It took years and a huge amount of work for researchers to determine the biological characteristics of this rare and mysterious mammal,” said Kirsten Young, a senior lecturer in biology at the University of Exeter, UK, who has spent a lot of time studying whales.
“Sometimes I wonder how many animals are living in the deep ocean that we have never heard of,” Young added.
The first spade-toothed whale skeletons were found in 1872, on New Zealand’s Pitt Island. The bones of another spade-toothed whale were found on Chile’s Robinson Crusoe Island in 1986.
Spade-toothed whale carcass washed up on the coast of New Zealand in 2010 (Photo: Nation News).
Initially, scientists thought that these were bones from a known beaked whale. However, DNA analysis showed that these were bones from a completely different and previously unrecorded whale species.
Scientists were unable to determine whether the mammal was extinct or not, as no individuals were known to survive in the wild. Until 2010, the carcasses of two intact spade-toothed whales washed up on a New Zealand beach.
New Zealand is considered a “hot spot” for whale strandings and the number of whale carcasses washing ashore. According to the New Zealand Department of Conservation, since 1840, the country has recorded more than 5,000 cases of whale strandings or whale carcasses washing ashore.