A carcass found washed up on a beach in New Zealand may be that of the world’s rarest whale, scientists have said. Spade-toothed whales are a type of beaked whale named for their teeth resembling the spade-like “flensing” blade once used to strip whales of their blubber. Knowledge of their existence is mostly based on a series of bones and tissue discovered decades apart and later sequenced, showing a new, shared DNA.
But scientists in New Zealand believe that a whole specimen may just have been found in Taieri Mouth, Otago. It is the proverbial white whale of whale species, and it looks a lot like a very big dolphin.
Anton van Helden, the science adviser at the New Zealand department of conservation’s marine species team, is one of the world’s experts on the spade-toothed whale. He “resurrected” the species when it was thought to be extinct, and helped to name it. “There is no doubt that that is what it is,” he told the Guardian.
Best of all it has somehow been transported to a freezer, which means decisions can be taken slowly. “We’re not talking over a carcass sitting in the hot sun,” he said.
Gabe Davies, operations manager at New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC), said in a press release: “Spade-toothed whales are one of the most poorly known large mammalian species of modern times.” He said that the finding was “huge”.
If confirmed through DNA testing, the specimen, which is male, will be the first complete specimen ever to be dissected by scientists.
Genetic samples of the whale have already been sent to the University of Auckland’s Cetacean Tissue Archive – the second largest collection of whale, dolphin and porpoise tissue in the world – for DNA sequencing, though it may take months for a definitive result.
But before any if this could happen it had to be moved, quickly, and put in a freezer large enough to hold a five-metre long animal. All previous specimens had either been only bones, body parts, or flesh in various states of decay – and sandiness, said Van Helden.
So, at 9.30pm the night the whale was found, Trevor King, who owns an earthmoving business in Dunedin, got a phone call. “I thought, ‘Who is this ringing in this hour?’” he said. “And lo and behold, it was the Department of Conservation.”
“The mission was to go down there and shift it from where it was and bury it up on the sand dunes,” he said.
He thought it would be a fairly simple job, he said. But he cleared his schedule anyway, telling people, “Oh, I can’t go, I’ve got to go bury a whale”.
King has buried about half a dozen whales over the course of his 35-year career, but never one so rare.
When he arrived, there were about 14 people there, and “there were a lot of phone calls going on to and fro”, he said.
“It turns out the thing is so unusual. It looked like a massive giant dolphin, the shape of it,” he said.
Among those on the phone was Jim Fyfe, a coastal marine ranger. A surfer had called the day before to say that there was an animal on the beach.
When Fyfe first saw it he thought, “It’s bigger than the porpoise that it had been reported as”. He walked up to its mouth, which was open, to examine its teeth, but found that they were broken off. He started sending pictures back to DOC in the hopes of identifying it.
Van Helden was recovering from surgery, but photographs taken by Fyfe eventually got through to him. The next morning, as he drove out to the beach, Fyfe got a phone call.
“This is so rare,” Van Helden told him. “This is really important.”
“So if I can get this whale into a freezer,” said Fyfe, “That would make you quite happy then?”
“I can tell you a hundred per cent” that it is a spade-toothed whale, Van Helden told the Guardian. “There is no doubt, no doubt,” he said.
Six samples of spade-toothed whales have been found, including the first, in 1874, when the species was first described based on a lower jaw bone and two teeth found in Pitt Island, Rēkohu. DNA taken from the tissue of two buried specimens, a mother and calf, in 2010 allowed scientists to describe what it looked like. In 2017, another specimen was beached very remotely in Waipiro Bay, north of Gisborne, and buried before being dissected, Van Helden said.
In a 2012 study on the spade-toothed whale, published in Current Biology, scientists note that several species of beaked whale live in the South Pacific Ocean, which has some of the world’s deepest ocean trenches. The “enigmatic” cetaceans are believed to be “exceptionally deep divers” the study said, spending their time far below the surface hunting squid and small fish.
Where do you find a freezer big enough to hold a whale? “Well, last year we had a sunfish,” said Fyfe, and he had found a cold store in Dunedin that had been happy to help store it (sun fish grow to about a metre in length).
On the beach that morning, the tide was coming in, threatening to trap King and his digger. So he and another person got to work. They ran a strap under the whale’s tail, which could be lifted fairly easily, and “under-mined” under its very heavy head; each digging from opposite sides until their hands met. He hooked the straps to the digger and lifted the whale into the air.
“I trundled along the beach with it and had to throw it up at the sand dune,” he said, and then drive up the dune and pull it up further. Eventually, he loaded the whale on to a truck.
New Zealand’s Indigenous people consider whales a taonga – a sacred treasure – of cultural significance, Te Rūnanga ō Ōtakou chair Nadia Wesley-Smith said. “We place importance on any species that is having a significant or out of the ordinary situation or incident that’s affecting them.”
She spoke to young Ōtākou who were on the beach, and who tied a harakeke, a woven rope, around the whale’s tail as a mark of respect.
In pre-settler times, Wesley-Smith explains, the jawbone of the whale would have been taken as a mark of mana, or respect. In this case, because the whale is potentially so rare, Te Rūnanga ō Ōtākou is going to work with the DOC to make a plan for the whale’s remains once it has been studied.
Māori leaders then conducted a ceremony before the truck left acknowledging Tangaroa, God of the Sea, and the whale’s journey.
King drove the truck 20km to an industrial cold storage facility in Dunedin. Then he had to figure out how to get it into the cold room. “That turned into a real mission,” he said. The whale was five metres long and the door 2 metres wide. He tried a few different angles, and eventually got it through.
So, in a building somewhere in the small city of Dunedin, there lies a large mystery wrapped in plastic.
“Just imagine a five metre long white sausage,” said Fyfe.
In his spare time, Van Helden performs as a magician, something he has done since he was 18. Rare whale species and sleight of hand do have something in common, he says. “It’s having a mind that’s absorbed in things that amaze me, and trying to figure them out.”
• This article was amended on 17 July 2024 to clarify that the 2012 study published in Current Biology looked at the spade-toothed whale and that beaked whales are not solely found in the South Pacific Ocean.
