Meet the spade-toothed whale. It is the rarest whale in the world. People have found only seven of its kind—ever. And all of those were dead. What do we know about this kind of whale? Almost nothing!
But this week, scientists and cultural experts in New Zealand cluster around a dead spade-toothed whale. They hope to decode decades of mystery.
The creature washed up on a New Zealand beach in July. “I can’t tell you how extraordinary it is,” says Anton van Helden. He’s a marine science advisor for New Zealand’s conservation agency. He even gave the spade-toothed whale its name!
People have never seen a spade-toothed whale alive at sea. (At least, no one has ever recorded a sighting.)
Things scientists don’t know about spade-toothed whales:
- where in the ocean they live
- why they’ve never been spotted in the wild
- what their brains look like
- how they process their food
- how this one died
The dead whale stretches 16 feet long. It’s male.
“There may be parasites completely new to science that just live in this whale,” says Mr. van Helden. He’s excited to find out how it made noise and what it ate. “Who knows what we’ll discover?”
A scientist found the first spade-toothed whale bones in 1872 on New Zealand’s Pitt Island. People made another discovery at an island in the 1950s. The bones of a third whale were found on Chile’s Robinson Crusoe Island in 1986. In 2002, scientists used DNA to prove all three were the same species.
Mr. van Helden’s whale lies surrounded by white-aproned scientists. They measure. They photograph. Then they carefully cut the whale open to learn about its insides.
Joy Reidenberg is one of these scientists. “What we are interested in is not only how these animals died, but how they lived,” she says.
Here is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great. — Psalm 104:25
