An 11.5-meter-long whale, which washed ashore in the Florida Everglades in January 2019, turns out to be a completely new species. And it is already considered endangered, scientists say.
When the behemoth’s body was washed along the Sandy Key – underweight with a piece of hard plastic in the gut – scientists thought it was a subspecies of the Bryde whale (pronounced “broodus”), a species of whale in the same group that includes rooster and blue whales. This subspecies was called Rice’s whale.
Now, after genetic analysis of other Rice whales along with an examination of the skull of the Everglades whale, researchers believe that, rather than a subspecies, the Rice whale is a completely new species, living in the Gulf of Mexico.
The discovery, detailed on January 10 in the journal The science of marine mammals, also means that there are less than 100 members of this species living on the planet, making them “critically endangered”, according to a statement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
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According to the study, the researchers analyzed recordings of Caribbean whales and the greater Atlantic Ocean and concluded that the whales they saw were evidence “of an undescribed species of Balaenoptera in the Gulf of Mexico.”
The study’s lead author, Patricia Rosel, and her co-author, Lynsey Wilcox, both at Southeast Fisheries Science Center, completed the first genetic testing of this whale in 2008, finding that Rice’s whale’s skull was different from Bryde’s whales.
In addition to having different skulls, Rice’s whales are slightly different in size from Bryde’s whales, the new analysis showed. They can weigh up to 60,000 pounds (27,215 kilograms) and grow up to 12.8 meters in length, according to NOAA, while Bryde’s whales have been known to reach up to 50 feet (15.2 m) and weighing more than 55,000 pounds (24,947 kg).
Rosel and her colleagues believe that whales of the new species can live for about 60 years, but given that there are so few, researchers need additional observation of whales to get a better idea of their life expectancy. .
Due to their location in the Gulf of Mexico, Rice whales are particularly vulnerable to oil spills, shipwrecks and energy exploration and production, NOAA added.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.