Beaked whales are truly strange creatures. They are the deepest-diving of all marine mammals – a Cuvier’s beaked whale set the record in 2014, at 2,992m – and spend over 90 per cent of their lives in the dark depths of the pelagic ocean.
One good reason why they’re so difficult to see, let alone study. Yet they constitute our second largest cetacean family, Ziphiidae, after oceanic dolphins.
How many species of beaked whales are there?
The six genera and 23 species of beaked whale that have been seen and described so far range from the relatively common Cuvier’s, Sowerby’s and bottlenose whales, to more obscure species such as Hector’s, Shepherd’s, Stejneger’s and Longman’s.
How big are beaked whales?
They range in size from the huge northern bottlenose whale of the North Atlantic, which can reach 9.8m in length, to the pygmy beaked whale of the South Pacific
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Where do beaked whales live?
As a family, beaked whales might be said to be very successful, being present in every ocean. Yet it’s only with the advent of digital video and photography that we have been able to identify these enigmatic creatures in their own environment. Look up True’s beaked whale and in even the best reference works you will find blurred images of ‘probable’ sightings. One respected cetacean field guide notes of True’s distribution: “Movements, if any, unknown. Population: perhaps naturally rare.”
Such ‘data deficiency’ is enough to lure any ‘whalehead’ on. But whose imagination wouldn’t be sparked by the notion of such rarely seen large animals inhabiting the oceans?
They certainly present extreme identification difficulties – especially because the key diagnostic is the shape of their prominent pairs of teeth, or tusks, which jut out of their lower jaws. In some species, these protuberances can completely grow over the beak, like a muzzle. It’s only because beaked whales suck in their main prey – squid – that they thrive with such an apparent handicap.
Of all beaked whales, the bottlenose are perhaps the easiest to identify, from their prominent melons – the bulbous foreheads that contain fatty oil now thought to function as a bio-acoustical aid. Other species in the family are also subtly marked. Arnoux’s, Blainville’s and Cuvier’s beaked whales bear patterns of scratches on their bodies, much like Risso’s dolphins – a result of tussles with squid and also male-to-male fighting.
A young Perrin’s beaked whale – “still largely unknown at sea” – may have a pale cape around its dorsal area, a little like the white saddle on an orca. But this disappears as it matures and joins the other Ziphids in what seems to be a shape-shifting game of detection for us humans.
We do not know their movements, their social or cultural arrangements, or where and when they breed. But then, we don’t even know the breeding grounds of the second-largest animal on Earth, the relatively common fin whale.
Can you see beaked whales around the UK?
Yet for all their rarity, beaked whales are no strangers to the waters around Great Britain. Oddly enough, one of the best places to see them has been from the deck of passenger ferries on routes from Portsmouth or Plymouth across the Bay of Biscay to Spain. I once saw a Cuvier’s beaked whale breach off the bow of one of these ships. It was a stunning sight.
The weirdly marked, bird-like head of this species has earned it the alternative name of ‘goose-beaked whale’, conjuring up medieval images of barnacle geese, supposedly born of barnacles. The whale owes its usual nomination to the great French naturalist, Georges Cuvier. When he discovered its skull in 1823, it looked so weird that he assumed it belonged to an animal that had long been extinct. It took 50 years for scientists to establish that it was still alive and swimming in the sea.
Top image: Cuvier’s beaked whale Getty images