Two New Whale Species Discovered Among Decades-Old Specimens
By rickyjames, Section News Posted on Wed Nov 19, 2003 at 11:11:03 AM PST
So-called rorqual whales have baleen, a horny substance found in rows of plates along their upper jaws used to strain plankton out of seawater, instead of teeth. Until today, there were six recognized types of rorquals: blue, humpback, fin, sei, minke and Bryde's. Now, Japanese scientists have announced DNA studies on worldwide museum samples from supposed Bryde's whales which show they are in fact from three different species. These have been christened Balaenoptera brydei, edeni and omurai. This discovery of not one but two new species of whale is a remarkable achievement; these new species have noticable differences in their skull and baleen plate shapes compared to the traditional Bryde's. The effort was led by Tadasu Yamada, a biologist at the National Science Museum in Tokyo, and is to be published tomorrow in Nature (Volume 426, page 278).
Scott Baker of the University of Auckland in New Zealand has stressed that understanding the abundance of these various Balaenoptera species is of critical importance because the Japanese have proposed to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) a commercial hunt of Bryde's whales. "Currently, all baleen whales are protected by an international moratorium on commercial hunting. If this moratorium were to be overturned, however, you need to understand both taxonomic identity and population structure in order to estimate abundance and calculate an appropriate catch limit," he noted.
Suspicions arose that there was more than one kind of Bryde's whale from observations initially made in Korean whale meat markets. This led Yamada's group to test tissue samples taken from eight suspiciously different whales harvested for meat in 1970, as well as a sample from a carcass that washed ashore in 1998. Now that he knows what to look for, Yamada is currently aware of ten B. omurai specimens stored in museums around the world that have been misclassified as Bryde's whales.
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