Imagine you're relaxing on your couch, having a cup of tea, and watching a live stream of a beach close by, trying to decide if you should go surfing, when you suddenly spot what is believed to be the rarest whale in the world.
Well, your day just took a turn.
That's what happened to Patrick Gallagher in Dunedin, New Zealand — his regular day just turned into a great discovery!
You sometimes see seagulls that look like surfers and surfers that look like boats... beached dolphins that are actually logs.
I almost didn't call it into DOC because I thought they must've known about it or it had been there for a while. I didn't want to be annoying.
Pretty lucky that I actually put my big kid pants on and rang it in.
Gallagher spotted what the Department of Conservation (DOC) believes is a male spade-toothed whale, the rarest whale in the world. Unfortunately for us, this poor guy was beached (aka dead). We've actually never seen this elusive marine mammal alive.
Gallagher called up the DOC and described what looked like a porpoise. He got in touch with DOC ranger Jim Fyfe and passed along the link to the webcam where he spotted the whale. Fyfe reached out to him again a few days later.
He mentioned that they'd been able to grab it and that it was a super rare beaked whale that was going to be frozen and held for further research.
The rarest whale on the planet was found by me sitting on my couch, having a cup of tea, dreaming about having a surf when my wee baby daughter was feeling a little bit hōha.
This beached whale is a BIG deal! (And not just in size.) It's also only the seventh spade-toothed whale specimen ever studied and the first one we get to dissect. The last documented spade-toothed whale was in 2017.
According to the DOC, this big boy was five meters (16 feet) long.
Kirsten Young, a senior lecturer in ecology at the University of Exeter who has previously studied spade-toothed whales, compared this discovery to finding Sasquatch.
It's like the yeti. It's like the Sasquatch. It's a big animal that lives in the deep ocean that we really have no idea about.
Scientists hope we can now learn much more about the creature. These beaked whales spend most of their time deep in the ocean hunting for squid and fish, which keeps them a mystery to us land mammals.
The spade-toothed whale, or Mesoplodon traversii, was first identified in 1874 from a jawbone found on Pitt Island, New Zealand. Nearly a decade later, scientists found skull fragments and started learning more about them. It wasn't until 2010 that a mother and calf washed up on Opape Beach, giving scientists their first full look. They discovered these whales have black snouts, dark flippers, and white bellies.
Other than that, we still don't know much.
According to Trevor King, a contractor who relocated the whale from the beach to cold storage, this whale is in great condition for study.
This one was very fresh. There was no smell or nothing. It hadn't been dead long, obviously, because it was just perfect.
Although most of the questions scientists have, like their behavior and where they live, can only be answered by seeing them alive in the wild, scientists can at least check out the whale's stomach contents to figure out its diet.
Young said the rare beached whale "is a testament to the fact that there's so much about the oceans we don't know."
We think we know everything about science and the animals that live around us, and we really don't.
Oh man, what else is down in the deep blue that we know nothing about?!
Wild stuff!
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