Song of the Whale

Sounding the Deep: On the Trail of elusive Beaked Whales…

Cuvier’s beaked whale, Azores, North Atlantic Ocean. © Lisa Steiner

Between April and October 2008 the Song of the Whale team is working in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean around the Canary Islands, the Azores, Madeira and off the coast of Portugal. The team will be focusing mostly on beaked whales. There are at least 20 species of beaked whales but they are rarely spotted because they inhabit very deep offshore waters where humans rarely go. Only a few have been studied in detail and some species have never been seen alive! There is even one species (the ‘Spade-toothed’ beaked whale) known only from bones found on beaches and we have no idea what it may look like in the flesh. Also, there could be species of beaked whales yet to be discovered! Eleven species have been discovered since 1908 the latest being Perrin’s beaked whale in 2002. It is very likely that there are other species that we don’t know about.

All beaked whales have a beak (or rostrum) which varies in size, a pair of grooves on the throat and ‘flipper pockets’ that they can tuck their flippers into to help them swim better. They also have large flukes (tail) in relation to their body size. We know that they are very deep divers and so are out of sight for long periods. They are usually found in water that is at least 300 metres deep and eat mostly fish and squid.

The best way to tell beaked whales apart is to study the size and shape of their teeth and the position of those teeth in the lower jaw (several species are named after their teeth e.g. ‘Gingko-toothed’ beaked whales have teeth similar in shape to the leaves of the gingko tree). However when you consider that most species have only a single pair of teeth and these occur only in adult males you start to understand just how difficult a task is it to tell one species of beaked whale from another!

Although we know so little about the lives of beaked whales, we do know that they face many threats in all the oceans of the world. These include being hunted and killed in the Pacific’, the destruction of their habitat (particularly by deep sea trawling); getting caught in fishing nets; loss of their food supply because of too much fishing by humans; pollution in the sea (particularly plastic rubbish which they eat); and underwater noise which we think is often the cause of mass strandings (see our Campaign Focus on Ocean Noise). The sad fact is that most of us are more likely to see a dead beaked whale on a beach than a living one in the water.

Don't miss the SOTW Team's Animal Action Week video about marine debris and the team's efforts to protect marine wildlife while on the trail of elusive beaked whales...

Sowerby’s beaked whales, Madeira, North Atlantic Ocean. © Richard McLanaghan

The Song of the Whale team will be using all their skills over the next few years to try and find out more about beaked whales. We want to find out what type of noises they make so that we can develop equipment and computer programmes to find them underwater – just like we do with sperm whales. The task is particularly tricky as most beaked whales produce ultrasonic clicks (clicks that are above the limit of human hearing) and we therefore need to use special microphones to record them. If we have the technology to find out where they live we will be in a much better position to protect them. We may also be able to identify beaked whale ‘hotspots’ that could be protected from harmful human activities.

Check out this list of species that have been discovered since 1908! These species consist of 13% or more of all living cetaceans known:

• Andrew's beaked whale
• spectacled porpoise
• True's beaked whale
• Chinese river porpoises [dolphin]
• Longman's beaked whale
• Tasman beaked whale
• Fraser's dolphin
• vaquita
• gingko-toothed beaked whale
• Hubbs’ beaked whale
• pygmy beaked whale