#Blainville's beaked whale

[inatungulates]

Blainville's beaked whale Mesoplodon densirostris

Observed by sandrita_bio, CC BY-NC

[whaleswagbracket]

Whale Tournament Masterpost!

Welcome to the whale swag bracket, a competition to determine the best species of whale! This competition will include 64 species (who have already been selected) in the infraorder Cetacea, which includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises. 

All match ups were decided randomly, and I did my best to prevent any ridiculously unfair matchups. I encourage everyone to make an effort to learn about some lesser-known competitors, I’m sure you’ll find them quite interesting!

The only rules are to have fun, be nice to everyone, and don’t bot the polls please I love whales too but let’s make this fair.

The first round of polls will be split up into two groups to prevent too many polls running at once, and the first round will begin on Friday, February 17th at 12 PM EST. Links to all the polls, as well as the complete bracket, can be found here!

Bracket

Round One, Part One: CLOSED

Gray whale vs True’s beaked whale

Northern bottlenose whale vs Strap-toothed whale

Atlantic spotted dolphin vs Dall’s porpoise

Northern right whale dolphin vs Rice’s whale

White-beaked dolphin vs Cuvier’s beaked whale

Killer whale vs false killer whale

Tucuxi vs Risso’s dolphin

Sei whale vs Narwhal

Heaviside’s dolphin vs Blue whale

Dwarf sperm whale vs Harbor porpoise

Antarctic minke whale vs Hector’s dolphin

Striped dolphin vs Rough-toothed dolphin

Commerson’s dolphin vs Spectacled porpoise

Pygmy right whale vs Sato’s beaked whale

Atlantic white-sided dolphin vs Southern right whale dolphin

Hourglass dolphin vs Common dolphin

Round One, Part Two: CLOSED

Yangtze finless porpoise vs Blainville’s beaked whale

Bottlenose dolphin vs Indus river dolphin

Melon-headed whale vs Southern right whale

Omura’s whale vs Amazon river dolphin

Pygmy sperm whale vs Australian humpback dolphin

Baiji vs Vaquita

Spinner dolphin vs Bowhead whale

Pantropical spotted dolphin vs Dusky dolphin

Australian snubfin dolphin vs Bryde’s whale

Short-finned pilot whale vs Pygmy killer whale

Beluga vs Humpback whale

North Atlantic right whale vs Fin whale

Common minke whale vs Irrawaddy dolphin

Sowerby’s beaked whale vs La Plata river dolphin

Sperm whale vs Indo Pacific humpback dolphin

Baird’s beaked whale vs Pacific white-sided dolphin

Round Two: ONGOING

Gray whale vs Strap-toothed whale

Atlantic spotted dolphin vs Northern right whale dolphin

Cuvier’s beaked whale vs Killer whale

Tucuxi vs Narwhal

Blue whale vs Harbor porpoise

Antarctic minke whale vs Striped dolphin

Commerson’s dolphin vs Sato’s beaked whale

Southern right whale dolphin vs Hourglass dolphin

Yangtze finless porpoise vs Indus River dolphin

Southern right whale vs Amazon river dolphin

Pygmy sperm whale vs Vaquita

Spinner dolphin vs Dusky dolphin

Australian snubfin dolphin vs Pygmy killer whale

Beluga vs Fin whale

Irrawaddy dolphin vs La Plata river dolphin

Sperm whale vs Pacific white-sided dolphin

Round Three: CLOSED

Gray whale vs Atlantic spotted dolphin

Killer whale vs Narwhal

Blue whale vs Striped dolphin

Commerson’s dolphin vs Hourglass dolphin

Yangtze finless porpoise vs Amazon river dolphin

Vaquita vs Spinner dolphin

Australian snubfin dolphin vs Beluga

Irrawaddy dolphin vs Sperm whale

Round Four: CLOSED

Atlantic spotted dolphin vs Narwhal

Blue whale vs Hourglass dolphin

Amazon river dolphin vs Vaquita

Beluga vs Sperm whale

[emmavonskulltaker]

I feel like this kinda glosses over the fact that some of these whales can only open their mouths a bit because their teeth wrap around their rostrum like some kind of bizarre toothy muzzle - consider the male strap-toothed beaked whale

and then there’s whatever it is blainville’s beaked whales are doing

Hey guess what we’re talking about beaked whales today

BEAKED WHALES are somewhere between a sperm whale and a dolphin phylogenetically. Much like their name suggests, they have long snouts!

Unlike a dolphin, they usually only have two teeth, which come in a variety of interesting shapes and sizes!

The reason beaked whales are rarely mentioned in whale discussion is because not much is known about them. They’re super elusive and live almost exclusively in deep trenches, where they spend most of their time at great depth hunting squid and fish. The longest and deepest diving mammal is the Cuvier’s beaked whale, which has been recorded descending to nearly 10,000 ft and staying underwater for over three hours!

I know what you’re thinking; these things just kinda look like a weird dolphin, why are they considered a whale? Well, it’s because they be Big. The largest is the Baird’s beaked whale, which is roughly the same size as a gray whale.

They also have FIN POCKETS, which is exactly what it sounds like. Little pockets to tuck their fins into to become super-streamlined.

(Very shaped beasts, these)

In summary!

Beaked

Whale

Thank you

[bitch-dont-krill-my-vibe]

Blainville's beaked whale

The profile shot shows the highly-arched lower jaw of an adult male, with erupted teeth extending above the upper jaw. The ventral photo shows the throat grooves which are characteristic of beaked whales. The brownish coloration on its head is from diatoms. 

This individual has a lot of white oval scars, caused by cookie-cutter shark bites (the scarring patterns to identify individuals). 

X

[nephrosoupp]

h-hey ever ,,you ever read a book on whales, dolphins and porpoises and felt ,,extremely sad and guilty because so many species are marked ‘near extinct’ or have conditions ‘unknown’ diminished from humans farming whale oil

[electricnik]

Blainville’s beaked whale. Watercolour on recycled book page.

[namu-the-orca]

A bunch of beaked whales

I did mention I got to paint a lot of beaked whales, right? ;) After the bottlenose whales here are, well, the others. I thought it was nice to put them all together, really makes you appreciate the wonderful diversity within this big family (and it saves you from ‘a beaked whale a day’ for the next 1.5 weeks). There’s too many to all discuss individually but I have some favourites:

Shepherd’s beaked whale was a joy to paint as they are one of my favourites. Their markings are so beautiful, and they are also unique in being the only beaked whale to have a full set of teeth. For very long their colour pattern was unknown (and oft presumed to have this streaky pattern) until in 2006(!) their real colouration was formally described. They are a beautiful, elegant and unique looking species.

Sowerby’s beaked whale provided a similar ‘aha’ erlebnis for me. Often illustrated as a medium gray throughout (which is certainly fitting for the females) some interesting photographs of adult males showed a rather distinctive light blaze between their blowhole and dorsal fin. In some males it was very subtle, but others had almost as much contrast as a Layard’s beaked whale - I chose to illustrate something in the middle. Very interesting and something I hope will be the subject of further study. Males and females also have funny white lips.

Ramari’s beaked whale can’t be overlooked as it is the youngest member of the family: only described three months ago, in October 2021. Previously known as the southern form of the True’s beaked whale, analysis proved they were a species all of their own. Very happy to have painted this one too, as the mysterious southern True’s with their shining white peduncles always intrigued me.

And lastly, I can’t not mention Blainville’s beaked whale because take a closer look at that snout. Any whale whose mouth somehow ends up above their eyes is worthy of an extra look I think. And the Layard’s beaked whale because they have always been my number 1 favourite beaker.

[gulducock]

Blainville's Beaked Whale

[whaletalesorg]

A Rare Encounter with Blainville's Beaked Whales. To read this story (and more!), follow the link in our bio.⁠⠀⠀⠀⠀ Photo by @npelsener⠀⠀⠀⠀ #whaletales #whales #beakedwhales #blainvillesbeakedwhales #getonaboat #whalewatching #storytelling #whalesareawesome #whaleblog #whalestory #whalelove https://www.instagram.com/p/CU0HAVnL_TH/?utm_medium=tumblr

[whaleswagbracket]

ROUND ONE PART TWO

[ID: A photo of a Yangtze finless porpoise underwater facing the viewer and a photo of a Blainville’s beaked whale surfacing, with a VS symbol between them. End ID.]

The Yangtze finless porpoise, as the name implies, is a unique little porpoise in that they solely inhabit the freshwater Yangtze river in China. They’re unfortunately critically endangered, though many people have been working very hard to save them. The Blainville’s beaked whale in the other corner, is keeping with the proud beaked whale tradition of having really weird fucking teeth. Those little nubs you see in the picture! Teeth! Or barnacles that like to grow on their teeth. Hard to tell the difference sometimes.

Photo credit to Zhang Kun and the NOAA

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Beaked whales have a killer whale problem.

More formidable whales, of the sperm or pilot variety, have the size and muscle to flee or defend against a killer whale, an ocean superpredator. Smaller prey, like dolphins, can find safety by swimming in large pods. Certain toothed whales even communicate in pitches killer whales can’t hear.

But elephant-sized beaked whales, named for their pointy snouts, have none of these advantages. These extreme divers swim in small groups, are too slow to outswim a killer whale, and rely on audible clicks to echolocate food deep in the ocean. Killer whales (Orcinus orca) should be able to hear them hunting below and easily pick them off as they ascend.

But beaked whales have evolved a sneaky trick.

An unusual, highly synchronized style of diving helps them silently slip past killer whales when surfacing to breathe, researchers describe February 6 in Scientific Reports. Predation from killer whales has shaped that strange behavior, the scientists say, and also might explain why naval sonar exercises, which can sound like predators to beaked whales, cause mass beaching events (SN: 3/25/11).

“Beaked whales are some of the most mysterious mammals in the world,” says Natacha Aguilar de Soto, a marine biologist at the University of La Laguna in the Canary Islands, Spain. This group of 22 whale species can dive deeper than any mammal, sometimes descending more than 2,000 meters to noisily hunt small fish and squid using echolocation for up to 2½ hours before surfacing.

Previous research has hinted that, when beaked whales return from the deep, they don’t come straight up for air like other whales. Instead, they ascend at a gradual angle, surfacing far from where they dove. “It’s highly unusual for whales to do this,” Aguilar de Soto says. She and her colleagues wondered whether it could help beaked whales slip past predators.

The team suction-cupped sensors that tracked depth, orientation and sound onto 14 Blainville’s beaked whales (Mesoplodon densirostris) and 12 Cuvier’s (Ziphius cavirostris) off the coasts of Spain, Portugal and Italy to better understand diving behavior in these groups. Instead of diving for food whenever an individual whale got hungry, tagged whales in the same group dove together 99 percent of the time.

On their way down, the whales swam in a tight group, remaining totally silent. But once they reached about 450 meters deep, they split up, loudly chirping to echolocate prey hundreds of meters from other group members.

Killer whales cannot hunt mammals this deep. But Aguilar de Soto says that the predators can eavesdrop on beaked whales while they hunt, and could hover above, waiting for them to ascend.

But when the whales finished foraging, they regrouped and began their silent, meandering ascent back to the surface, traveling as far as a kilometer from where they dove.

“That’s the trick to give the skip to killer whales,” Aguilar de Soto says.

The researchers estimate that killer whales, or orcas, can visually explore only 1.2 percent of the potential surfacing area of these beaked whales. Such behavior allows diving groups, which often include young beaked whales, to stay together while also evading detection by predators.

But the unusual diving does have downsides. The beaked whales’ slow and silent ascent cuts foraging time by 35 percent, the study estimates, compared with whales that swim straight up.

“This study is a great achievement; it’s really hard to get good data on these whales,” says Nicola Quick, a behavioral ecologist at Duke University. The work supports the idea that predation has shaped this unusual diving behavior, although the gradual ascent also could be important for avoiding decompression sickness, she says.

Aguilar de Soto says the study helps to explain why beaked whales react so strongly to sonar. Having evolved in a “soundscape of fear,” she says, beaked whales may be hypersensitive to the sounds of predators. Sonar might hijack this response and drive disoriented and scared whales to swim until they’re beached.

While we can’t change this ingrained whale behavior, Aguilar de Soto says, “we can try to push governments to restrict these exercises to places where they’ll have less of an impact.”

[csnews]

Rare Hubbs’ beaked whale found washed ashore, deceased, at Point Reyes

Peter Fimrite - August 20, 2019

An extremely rare beaked whale was found washed up on a beach at Point Reyes National Seashore this week, prompting animated excitement among normally self-possessed marine scientists.

The dead 9-foot-long whale was found Monday morning on Drakes Beach by participants in the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary Beach Watch Program, which surveys beaches along the coast every two weeks.

“I’ve been doing this for 16 years now, so whenever you find something different like that it’s exciting,” said Dominique Richard, a retired mathematician, who with his survey partner, Gordon Bennett, found the animal just above the tide line. “It’s rare, and it was completely out of the blue. It was totally unexpected.”

The decomposing carcass had been scavenged a bit by sharks, so it wasn’t immediately clear what species it was. Richard and Bennett measured the whale, which they at first thought was a bottlenose dolphin, and took numerous photographs.

Biologists with the California Academy of Sciences and National Park Service scientists hauled away the entire carcass Tuesday and plan to conduct a necropsy, but they have tentatively identified it as a newborn Hubbs’ beaked whale.

Tissue samples were sent to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla (San Diego County) to confirm the species. That will take about a month.

“The best guess at this point, without having verified its species, though, is that it may have died from “maternal separation” — being orphaned,” said Mary Jane Schramm, spokeswoman for the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, based in San Francisco. “No other cause is suspected.”

Not much is known about the beaked whales except that they are the deepest diving whales. Of the 22 known species, the Cuvier’s, Hubbs’, Baird’s and Blainville’s beaked whales are known to visit Northern California.

The adult whales can measure 13 feet to 43 feet in length and weigh from 1 ton to 13 tons.

One of eight tagged Cuvier’s beaked whales in a 2013 study at the Channel Islands in Southern California was recorded diving to 9,874 feet and staying there for 2 hours and 17 minutes. It was the deepest dive by a whale ever recorded and so unexpected that scientists thought at first that the monitoring equipment had malfunctioned.

Marine biologists still haven’t figured out how beaked whales are able to dive to such depths, where the pressure would kill other mammals.

“They are very cryptic and hard to spot. ... We know so little about beaked whales” because “extremely deep diving animals are rarely seen,” Schramm said. “They are so little studied that scientists cannot comfortably put them into a category.”

One thing that is known is that they are extremely sensitive to noises, especially sonar. The most notable sightings of the whales have occurred during mass stranding events during Navy sonar tests in the Bahamas, Mediterranean and around the Canary Islands, she said.

It is believed that sonar prompts the whales to panic and surface rapidly, causing decompression. Postmortems of stranded beaked whales after sonar tests have found hemorrhaging near the ears.

Sonar is not believed to be the cause of death for the Point Reyes whale, Schramm said, because Naval sonar exercises are not done in the Bay Area.

Beaked whales are named for their beaks, which are similar to those on dolphins. They also lack the central notch on their tail flukes that other whales have. Females of the species have teeth, but they generally do not break through the gums.

Schramm said the beaked whale might never have been found if it weren’t for the beach watch program, which has surveyed 54 beaches, from Point Arena in Mendocino County to Año Nuevo State Park in San Mateo County for the past 25 years.

A Hubbs’ whale was found alive on Ocean Beach in 1989. It survived for several days before succumbing despite round-the-clock care, Schramm said.

[foulserpent]

and another bit of sea life i think goes really unappreciated is beaked whales?

like these guys are a family of cetaceans with dolphin-like beaks, but are much bigger than most dolphin species and dive to the deepest depths of any known marine mammals when foraging. and we know very little about most species, because they spend so much of their time deep underwater and only being near the surface briefly to breathe. some species have never been seen alive, and are only known from partial skeletal remains.

and like theyre REALLY cool looking, most beaked whale species have tusklike teeth that develop only in males, which is generally assumed to be used in the selection of mates. but like look at these

[the-circles-of-life]

Mesoplodon densirostris Blainville's beaked whale

ft. Rosemary Mosco / @birdandmoon

For Rosemary Mosco, art, writing, and humor are useful tools for getting people excited about science. If somebody tells her, "Wow, I had no idea that salamanders were so pretty!" or, "I started noticing birds!" then her day is made.

She tells stories that bridge the gap between scientists and the public. In practice, she has written books, made comics and posters, and led field walks. But on the internet, she’s best known for her webcomic series Bird and Moon.

“I loved both science and art when I was a kid, and I dreaded the moment when I'd have to "grow up" and pick just one of them. But as I got older, I realized that there's a longstanding precedent for blending the two.”

To Rosemary, there wouldn't be any science without art, and vice versa.

As a child, she was obsessed with whales and dolphins. She bought every book about them. But there’s one book that’s particularly memorable to her — ‘Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises’ by Mark Carwardine. This book was different. It had this huge section on the alluringly strange beaked whales.

“They defy the narrative of whales as smooth and majestic. They've got huge underbites and bizarre tusks. They feed by slurping up squid, using their beaks like a straw. Many of them live far from shore deep under the waves, which adds to their mystery.”

Though beaked whales make up almost a quarter of known whale species, all of her other books had just sort of glossed over them. “This was a classic case of writers and scientists not wanting to emphasize that there's a lot we don't know.”

To young Rosemary, this was a powerful moment. A light bulb went off in my head. “I realized that biology isn't ‘done’ or ‘complete.’ That there's much more to discover. And maybe, a kid like me could help fill in the gaps!”

Though she didn't go on to become a scientist, she loves giving people that feeling of wonder.

“I want them to know that the world is packed with mysteries waiting to be discovered.”

—

Rosemary is a Science Communicator. Her first book, Birding Is My Favorite Video Game, comes out April 17. Get to know Rosemary and the wonders of wildlife.

Tumblr · Facebook · Twitter · Instagram · Bird and Moon · Website

—

My main blog · Ko-fi · Patreon

[mack0h]

Bowhead, Humpback, Blainville’s beaked whale…


Just how many more species of freaking whales are out there?!


Helping Leon collectA them dinosaur & sea animal toys be breakin my back😭

Still, seeing my kiddo happy makes me feel happy😎

[cetacean-nation]

Sorry for the poor picture quality, but my CollectA pygmy sperm whale and Blainville’s beaked whale came in and they look great! I’m gonna get the Ganges river dolphin soon. CollectA is a more recent toy company but they’re the only one of the major toy animal companies (outside of Japan) to produce multiple obscure cetaceans. (though Safari Ltd. might be stepping it up, this year they released a sei whale, a vaquita, and a new whales Toob)