8/18/2014 Dried Meat 'Resurrects' Lost Species of Whale | Science/AAAS | News

LISA THOMPSON, ISLAND CONSERVATION SOCIETY, SEYCHELLES (2)

A whale of a mystery. DNA from a stranded beaked whale in the Seychelles (top)
and a close study of its skull (bottom) helped lead to the rediscovery of M. hotaula.

Dried Meat 'Resurrects' Lost Species

of Whale
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By Virginia Morell (/author/virginia-morell) 5 February 2014 2:00 pm 0

Comments (/biology/2014/02/dried-meat-resurrects-lost-species-
whale#disqus_thread)

A gift of dried whale meat—and some clever genetic sleuthing across almost
16,000 kilometers of equatorial waters—has helped scientists identify a long-
forgotten animal as a new species of beaked whale. The “resurrection” raises
new questions about beaked whales, the most elusive and mysterious of
cetaceans.

“Literally nothing is known about most species of beaked whales; they are
probably the least known family of large mammals,” says Robin Baird, a
cetacean biologist at Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia. “So it’s
exciting to have this study.”

The species, Mesoplodon hotaula, is a dark blue, Volkswagen-van-sized

cetacean with the prominent snout that gives beaked whales their common
name. It first came to scientists’ attention in 1963 when a single adult female
stranded on the coast of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. The director of the
National Museums of Ceylon, P. E. P. Deraniyagala, decided that it was
different from the other Mesoplodon species known at that time, and
assigned it the name hotaula, meaning “pointed beak” in the local Sinhala
language. But only 2 years later, M. hotaula was eliminated as a species
when other researchers decided that it was identical to M. ginkgodens
(another beaked whale which scientists know only from stranded carcasses
and have never seen alive in the sea).

Forty years later, locals on an atoll in the Gilbert Islands, part of the Republic
of Kiribati in the west Pacific, gave a visiting marine biologist dried strips of
whale meat left over from a recent festival. The sample was turned over to
cetacean geneticists at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who had
assembled a database of the DNA of all known beaked whales. “It was a
surprise, because the genetic sequences from the meat didn’t match any of
the known species,” says Scott Baker, a cetacean geneticist now at Oregon
State University’s Marine Mammal Institute in Newport, and one of the authors
of the study. “We thought we had a new species.”

Then, in 2005, other co-authors collected some whale bone and teeth on
Palmyra Atoll, which lies southeast of the Hawaiian Islands and 2600
kilometers northeast of the Gilbert Islands. The genetic sequences extracted
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8/18/2014 Dried Meat 'Resurrects' Lost Species of Whale | Science/AAAS | News

from these specimens matched those of the dried meat. “We knew then we
were on to something,” Baker says. Finally, in 2009, the body of a beaked
whale was found in the Seychelles, in the western part of the Indian Ocean; its
DNA also matched that of the dried meat sample, even though this whale
lived tens of thousands of kilometers away from the Gilbert Islands.

That was the clue the researchers needed. “We immediately wondered,
‘Could it be Deraniyagala’s beaked whale?’ ” Baker says. It was. The team
reports its resurrection of the forgotten M. hotaula
(http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mms.12113/abstract) today in
Marine Mammal Science. Counting M. hotaula, there are now 15 known
species in this genus, making it by far the most species-rich genus of
cetaceans.

Overall, the saga of M. hotaula shows “that there are probably even more
species of beaked whales that we don’t know about,” says Phil Clapham, a
marine mammalogist at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle,
Washington. “We don’t see them because they’re very deep-diving and live
far from land.” They also live in a poorly surveyed part of the ocean, Baker
says, where very few people dwell on remote atolls.

Intriguingly, it is the islanders who seem to know the most about M. hotaula
and some other beaked whales. The Gilbert Islands residents who provided
the original gift of dried meat reported that it came from one of seven whales
they had driven onto the beach and killed. “That was something we didn’t
know: that these beaked whales live in groups,” Baker says. “We thought they
were solitary” because of the single, stranded individuals that are
occasionally found. The scientists also believe that males of M. hotaula fight
each other, because this behavior is known in other species of beaked
whales, and because the teeth of two adult male specimens were broken.
“Other than that, and knowing that Deraniyagala was right, M. hotaula is still
pretty mysterious,” says Baker, who hopes to launch an expedition to learn
more about them.

Posted in Biology (/category/biology) , Plants & Animals (/category/plants-

animals) Whales (/tags/whales-0)

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