Strange Animals Podcast

Further reading:

https://sharonahill.substack.com/

https://metazoan.net/54-octlantis/

https://metazoan.net/109-octopolis-and-octlantis/

Scientists discover an underwater city full of gloomy octopuses

The gloomy octopus [photo by Niki Hubbard – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/118664956, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123044473]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

As I’ve mentioned before, I really don’t like April Fools Day, which is April first. I especially don’t like it when someone makes an April fools day post online and just leaves it there afterwards. It’s too easy for other people to stumble across it and think it’s real. This goes double for strange animal and cryptid reports.

I subscribe to geologist Sharon Hill’s Pop Goes the Cryptid articles, and on March 31 she talked about a hoax called the North American Pine Squid. It got popular around Halloween of 2024. It’s said to be a black squid or octopus that lives in pine trees in remote, heavily forested places like the Pacific northwest and the Appalachian mountains. Most of the time it eats small animals like birds and squirrels, along with pine cones, but if someone walks underneath its tree, the pine squid grabs the person, pulls them up into the tree, and they’re never seen again.

But you don’t have to worry, because the pine squid isn’t a real animal. It’s also not even a new story. It’s based on another hoax called the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, which dates back to 1998. In the case of the tree octopus, it wasn’t created as a hoax or an April fool’s joke but as a study about whether children can tell if a website is reliable or not. The researchers made a page with information about a type of octopus that lived in the ocean but that also climbed trees. Then they asked several classrooms of children around age 11, from different schools in different countries, to read the page, look at the pictures provided, and answer some questions.

The study found that most of the children thought the page contained reliable information. Only a few figured out that the tree octopus wasn’t real. The study has been used repeatedly to argue that children need more lessons in how to evaluate a website to know if it contains reliable information, and of course that’s always a good thing. But it makes me a little angry too, because how were the kids supposed to know that octopuses can’t climb trees? There are so many amazing and strange animals out there, a tree octopus sounds perfectly normal if you don’t know very much about octopuses. So I argue that kids should be taught about everything, and taught in as interesting a way as possible so that they remember it better. The same goes for adults.

But this episode isn’t actually about April fools day, tree octopuses, or pine squids. It is about a type of octopus, and what I’m going to tell you is so weird that I have to reassure you that it’s actually true. It’s not a hoax or an April fools joke or anything like that. It’s about the gloomy octopus and the underwater cities some populations have created, referred to as Octopolis and Octlantis. I swear I’m not making this up!

The gloomy octopus lives off the eastern coast of Australia and the northern coast of New Zealand. It’s mainly brown and gray, but it has orange on the undersides of its arms, and it’s covered in little bumps that help camouflage it. Its eyes are white. On average, it has an armspan of about 6 ½ feet, or 2 meters, with females generally larger than males. Like many other octopuses, when the female lays her eggs, she stops eating completely and protects the eggs until they hatch. After they hatch, she dies.

The gloomy octopus lives in shallow warm water and especially likes places with lots of rocks, seagrass, reefs, and other places where it can hide. It spends a lot of time in a den it digs into the sea floor, only coming out at night to hunt. It especially likes scallops, but it will eat pretty much anything it can catch, including sea snails, crabs, seahorses, and even other gloomy octopuses. It usually brings its food back to its den to eat.

The gloomy octopus was thought to be a solitary animal until 2009. That’s when a biologist named Matt Lawrence was exploring Jervis Bay in New South Wales. In this particular part of the bay, the sand is silty and there are a lot of predators, so it’s not great for the gloomy octopus. But not only did Lawrence find a gloomy octopus there, he found 16 of them living in close proximity.

The octopuses’ dens were very close to each other, surrounding a human-made object that’s so encrusted with sea life that it can’t be identified. Scientists think it was a piece that fell off a boat at some point. Even more interesting, there are so many shells around, especially scallop shells, that instead of making dens in the sand, the octopuses are basically making dens in huge piles of scallop shells. The octopuses spend time moving the shells to improve their dens.

In other words, Lawrence had found an octopus city. Admittedly, it’s a very small city by human standards, with only 16 residents identified at any given time, but for a supposedly solitary animal, that’s pretty amazing.

The site was nicknamed Octopolis, and scientists think the presence of the piece of boat actually started the site. When it fell into the sand, it provided a great place for a gloomy octopus to hide. Since gloomy octopuses bring mollusks back to the den to eat, naturally they discard the shells near their dens. Once enough discarded shells had piled up, it provided better building material for another den. Another octopus moved in as the first one’s neighbor, which meant twice as many shells being discarded. Pretty soon another octopus joined the first ones, and eventually there were 16 separate dens in a little community.

Then, in 2017, another octopus city was discovered not far from Octopolis. Instead of a human-made object at its center, it has a few rocks sticking up in the middle of the city, which has been nicknamed Octlantis.

Observations of the octopuses living in these communities are surprising. The octopuses come out during the day even though ordinarily the gloomy octopus is most active at night, especially around dawn and dusk. They interact with each other in various ways, sometimes fighting, sometimes pairing off to mate, sometimes sneaking into another octopus’s den and trying to take it over. It might not be full of underwater skyscrapers and underwater scallop vendors on busy corners, but there’s a lot of hustle and bustle in these cities.

When biologists revisited Octopolis in 2023, they only found three octopuses. Octlantis had a little more activity and a few more octopuses, but nothing like its busy 2017 numbers. But this doesn’t mean that the cities are deserted. Low Octopolis populations were also discovered in 2010 and 2013, but a high population in between. The biologists also noted that the presence of sharks caused the octopuses to move, and in 2023 a shark was hanging around Octopolis.

Another reason for the changing population sizes at the sites is that gloomy octopuses don’t live very long. A three-year-old gloomy octopus is really old, since most die before they reach their first birthday. The octopuses spotted in Octopolis and Octlantis in 2023 might be as much as 14 generations removed from the ones seen in 2009. Young octopuses have to continually repopulate the cities as the older ones die off, and that might take longer some years than others.

Just because we know about Octopolis and Octlantis doesn’t mean those are the only two octopus cities in existence. There are probably a lot more. Scientists just haven’t noticed them yet. In years where sharks are spending too much time in Octopolis, the octopuses might just move to a city we don’t know about. Octopolis and Octlantis might even be really small in comparison to some cities. If you’re a diver around Australia or New Zealand, keep a sharp eye out for an octopus city. You might be the first human to visit New Octleans.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Megarachne as we know it now:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Megarachne is only known from two specimens, neither of which is complete, which adds to the confusion. It lived around 300 million years ago in what is now South America. It was described in 1980 from the first specimen discovered and was named Megarachne, which means big spider. The scientist who described it thought it was a type of primitive spider related to modern tarantulas, but much bigger. He estimated its legspan was 20 inches, or 50 cm, with a body length of just over 13 inches, or 34 cm. That made it the largest spider ever known by a lot.

Other palaeontologists, especially arachnologists who specialize in spiders and their relations, weren’t convinced Megarachne was a spider. But it wasn’t until 2005 when a more complete specimen was discovered that anyone could say for sure what it was. The second specimen made it clear that it wasn’t a spider at all but a sea scorpion, or eurypterid, and not an especially large one compared to some. It probably grew to 21 inches long, or 54 cm.

But by then, Megarachne had gotten really popular as a giant spider. It was in the BBC documentary Walking with Monsters, although the producers changed its name to Mesothelae right before it aired, which was just after the new findings about Megarachne came out. Mesothelae is a suborder of big spiders from parts of Asia that retain many traits of ancestral spiders. It was a valiant attempt by the BBC to make the documentary less incorrect, but of course the spider they were talking about still wasn’t a spider and no spider known has ever grown that large.

But while Megarachne isn’t a giant spider, and isn’t even a very big eurypterid, it is important since not very many eurypterids are known from South America. It also appears to be closely related to Mycterops and Woodwardopterus, similar-looking euripterids from North America and Europe. But some researchers think it’s not as cut and dried as it sounds. Instead of three similar creatures living in different areas, they think there’s something else going on.

Eurypterids were arthropods, the phylum that includes insects, arachnids, and crustaceans, among others. Arthropods have an exoskeleton that they molt periodically as they grow, and many arthropods have complicated life stages compared to other animals. When a shark hatches, it looks like a miniature adult and just grows larger as it gets older, but when an arthropod hatches, it usually doesn’t look anything like its adult form. Some arthropods go through many stages of life before reaching the adult body plan. Crustaceans have numerous larval stages, for instance, that often look very different from the adult. Some researchers think that Megarachne, Mycterops, and Woodwardopterus were all the same animal, and that the differences are due to it being in three different stages of development when it died and was preserved.

We don’t have any way to know if this was correct, of course, not until we hopefully find more fossil remains. Other eurypterids did appear to go through some physical changes during maturation, as far as researchers can tell with the remains we have, but Megarachne, Mycterops, and Woodwardopterus belonged to a different family from other eurypterids and are much rarer. They might have been quite different developmentally.

We can also look at the living relations to see how likely it is that eurypterids had different larval stages where they looked different from the adult form. Eurypterids were probably most closely related to horseshoe crabs, although not everyone agrees. Horseshoe crabs have been around for 445 million years and are really neat animals that we’re lucky to still have in the world. The horseshoe crab hatches into a larva that looks a lot like a trilobite. It does indeed go through physical changes as it grows and molts over the course of three years, so it’s reasonable to assume that eurypterids did too.

On the other hand, some researchers think eurypterids were more closely related to modern scorpions. Scorpions actually give birth to live babies instead of laying eggs, and the female carries the babies on her back for several days up to several weeks, depending on the species. Once the babies have their first molt they look a lot more like miniature adults and pretty soon are able to leave their mother and hunt on their own. So again, it’s possible that eurypterids had a system more like this instead of like the horseshoe crab’s.

While we’re talking about scorpions, did you know that scorpions glow blue-green in ultraviolet light? The scorpion’s exoskeleton contains fluorescent chemicals, but we’re not sure why. Scorpions do have incredibly light sensitive eyes, and can navigate at night using only starlight. Their eyes can’t form sharp images like ours can, though. And scorpions have a lot of eyes. Spiders have four pairs of eyes, but some scorpions have more than that. All species have a pair on top of the cephalothorax, which corresponds to the head, and more on the sides of the cephalothorax. Some species have up to five pairs of eyes in addition to the ones on top of the head. Twelve eyes seems like overkill but it works for the scorpion. Eurypterids had both compound eyes and simple eyes.

That’s all we know about Megarachne right now, at least until we find more fossilized specimens. Let’s hope we do, and while we’re at it, let’s hope we find some more fossilized giant spiders because that would be cool.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading:

How did a tiny bee get to French Polynesia? Eight new species help solve a scientific mystery

Secrets in the canopy: Scientists discover 8 striking new bee species in the Pacific

Canopy specialist Hylaeus bees highlight sampling biases and resolve Michener’s mystery

Scientists discover endoparasitic marine tapeworm trapped in Cretaceous amber

Show transcript:

Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast for August 2024!

It’s the start of Invertebrate August, so we have two invertebrate mysteries to discuss today, one mostly solved and one not.

Let’s start with the solved mystery, about a tiny bee. In 1934, three tiny bee specimens were collected in French Polynesia, specifically on a particular type of flower in the Tuamotu Archipelago. The bees really were tiny, only 4 mm long. They weren’t described until 1965, when they were placed in the genus Hylaeus. This is a really big genus with over 500 species that live throughout the world, but the species most closely related to the newly described Tuamotu’s masked bee lives in Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand.

In case you’re kind of hazy on geography, like me, Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand are part of what’s called Oceania, a giant chunk of the Pacific Ocean where there’s not a whole lot of land. I mean, except for Australia, which is big. The Tuamotu Archipelago is also part of Oceania, and part of French Polynesia, but it’s really remote. It consists of a spread-out collection of 78 low islands, many of them too tiny to support humans, none of them with a source of fresh water except for rain. They’re tropical and quite beautiful, with many unique animals and plants living on and around them. They’re also almost 2,500 miles, or 4,000 km away from the places where the tiny bee’s closest relatives live.

Even in 1965, scientists had questions about the tiny bee. How did 4mm bees get to such remote islands, and were they even still around? The bees hadn’t been seen in the wild since 1934. Since the Tuamotu Archipelago has suffered from European explorers and missionaries bringing invasive species to some islands, colonization by France, and nuclear weapons testing, scientists worried the bee had gone extinct and that they would never solve the mystery of how it got there in the first place.

Bees are attracted to flowers, and the three 1934 specimens were discovered on flowers, so naturally scientists had been looking for the bees on flowers. But it turns out that in the Polynesian islands, bees mostly hang out in the treetops. Once scientists figured this out, they began discovering new species of bee—eight of them in fact, collected between 2014 and 2019 from various islands in Fiji, Micronesia, and French Polynesia.

All eight species are closely related to Tuamotu’s masked bee, so scientists now have a pretty good idea of how it traveled thousands of miles to get to its French Polynesian home. Its ancestors island-hopped. There are more than 1,700 islands in the Pacific Ocean, many of them barely known to humans.

Researchers think there are probably a lot more species of bee to be discovered in the treetops of Pacific islands, now that they know where to look. With luck, they’ll be able to find Tuamotu’s masked bee too, quietly living out its bee life above the scientists’ heads.

Next, let’s discuss our unsolved mystery. Amber, which is fossilized tree resin, is the gift that just keeps on giving to the scientific world, and our mystery involves a flatworm found in amber.

The amber comes from Myanmar and dates to about 99 million years ago. In addition to bits of inorganic matter like tiny pebbles and sand grains, most organisms found in amber from this site are insects and roundworms, animals you’d expect to find on and around trees. The team examining this particular piece of amber found lots of interesting things, but then they discovered this one.

The flatworm is about 10mm long and it’s beautifully preserved, which means the scientists were able to compare it to modern flatworms to see what it might be most closely related to. It’s most similar to a parasitic flatworm found in shark intestines. You know, an animal not typically found in trees. (I stole that joke from paleontologist Kenneth De Baets, by the way. Credit where credit’s due.) It isn’t a complete worm but a partial one, basically a tentacle with little hooks to keep it in place in the host animal’s digestive system.

The modern worm is classified as a type of tapeworm, and tapeworms are distressingly common parasites. If you’ve ever adopted a rescue cat or dog, you’ve probably had to have it treated for a tapeworm infestation. Luckily, tapeworms are also very specific about which species they parasitize, so you can’t get tapeworms from a pet. (It’s still icky.) Fish get tapeworms too, after eating marine invertebrates carrying various kinds of tapeworm larvae.

The question is, how did a parasitic worm found in fish end up in amber? Occasionally there is rare amber found that fell into water and trapped water organisms, but this particular amber wasn’t associated with water. Other items found in the same piece of amber included sand grains, tiny hairlike structures found on some ferns, and the nymph of a scale insect. The team suggests that the tree where the amber came from grew near a beach and that a dead shark washed ashore. While scavengers were picking through the carcass, a piece of worm somehow got separated from the body and ended up in a tree. Possibly a scavenger grabbed a big yummy mouthful of rotting shark guts and either climbed or flew up into a tree to eat it, and part of the worm fell out and landed in a blob of amber.

Because tapeworms are endoparasites, meaning they live inside their hosts, and because they’re soft-bodied and fragile, it’s very rare that one is preserved. Pretty much the only other preserved tapeworm specimen we have isn’t a tapeworm itself but some eggs found in fossilized shark dung, dated to 270 million year ago. Scientists aren’t even completely sure the eggs are from a flatworm since they’re not that well preserved. So it’s fantastic that this particular specimen was so well preserved, and that it made its way into the hands of scientists!

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading:

Gauguin’s Magical Mystery Koao

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

The French painter Paul Gauguin moved to the island of Hiva Oa in 1901, less than two years before he died. Hiva Oa is the second largest island in the Marquesas, a volcanic archipelago in Polynesia in the South Pacific. It’s extremely remote, only slightly closer to Mexico than it is to New Zealand, although Hawaii is even closer.

During his short time on Hiva Oa, Gauguin produced quite a few paintings, including a famous one whose title translates to “The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa.” It depicts a dancer and magician named Haapuani and represents the fast-vanishing local culture. One of the details of the painting is a bird on the ground next to a small dog. But no one can identify the bird in the painting.

The bird is mostly blue but with green face and wings, and the small dog appears to be biting its wing or back. It’s about the size of a chicken, although details aren’t especially clear due to Gauguin’s painting style. The bill is a brownish-red and is thick and pointed. The eye is the same brown-red.

No one paid much attention to the bird in the painting until a man named Thor Heyerdahl published a book about the Marquesas in 1974. He was most well known for his adventures sailing a balsawood boat, the Kon-Tiki, from South America to the Polynesian islands in 1947. In 1937, though, the most notable thing Heyerdahl did was see an unusual bird that he mentioned in his book.

He wrote that the bird had no wings and ran extremely fast when he startled it. It vanished into a thick bank of ferns and although he tried to catch another glimpse of it, it was gone. He later said it was about the size of a long-legged gull.

A French explorer also wrote about this bird in 1957, although he didn’t see it himself. He said the people who lived on the island called the bird koao, which meant “burrow bird” since it was supposed to hide in burrows. It was about the size of a rooster, purplish in color with a yellow bill, and while it only had little wings, its legs were long and it was a fast runner.

By 1979, researchers investigating the koao were told that it had gone extinct from overhunting, specifically by the French colonizers of Hiva Oa. Other researchers learned that the bird was supposed to have red eyes and was the size of a duck.

The ornithologist Jean-Jacques Barloy thought the bird sounded like a type of rail. Rails are relatively small birds that mostly stay on the ground. Even rail species that can fly are weak flyers, while many species are flightless. The family is a large one and includes birds like the American coot, the takahē of New Zealand, the common moorhen that lives throughout much of western Europe, South Asia, and parts of Africa, and the spotless crake that’s common throughout much of the South Pacific. Barloy suggested in 1979 that the koao might be a spotless crake.

The spotless crake is bluish-gray with reddish-brown back and wings, a black bill, red eyes, and pale orangey legs that are long for its size. It’s shy and mostly crepuscular, but when it’s out in daylight it never goes far from vegetation where it can hide. It prefers freshwater wetlands but will also live in forests as long as it has plenty of groundcover for shelter. It eats insects, worms, crustaceans, and even carrion, as well as plant material like seeds and fruit. It can fly but it would much rather run away from danger.

This doesn’t really fit with what we know of the koao. For one thing, the spotless crake is much smaller than a duck or rooster, smaller even than a crow. It doesn’t match the size or coloration of Gauguin’s mystery bird or the reports of the koao.

Even Barloy later decided he was wrong and suggested the koao might be a different type of rail, maybe even an unknown species of takahē. The takahē is dark blue with a greenish back, and its heavy beak and strong legs are red. This is much more similar to the bird Gauguin painted. The takahē was considered extinct until a small population was rediscovered in 1948, and while it’s flightless, its ancestors weren’t. Like New Zealand, many remote islands–including Hiva Oa–have no native mammals except bats. As a result, many island birds don’t need to fly because their predators are other birds like eagles. It’s easy to hide from an eagle if you’re foraging under cover of thick plants.

Without the bird itself or its remains, identifying it was impossible. Gauguin was a post-Impressionist painter who influenced later artists of the avant-garde movement, so his paintings aren’t photo-realistic. He was just making art, not illustrating a scientific treatise. The details of his painted bird might not be totally accurate and aren’t specific enough to help with an identification. All we know is that the koao looks like a type of rail and doesn’t match any known species of bird. So we’re back where we started.

But new species of rail keep being discovered in Polynesian islands, most from subfossil remains found during archaeological excavations. In 2007 three new species of extinct rail were described from remains a few hundred years old, while a fourth specimen consisted of only two bones, not enough to identify as a new species. Those two mystery bones were found on Hiva Oa. These findings show that many more species of rail and other birds once lived on the islands, probably driven to extinction by introduced rats and other non-native animals.

A rail described in 1988 from 600-year-old remains, Porpyrio paepae, sometimes called the Marquesas swamphen, may be the koao. It lived on Hiva Oa and another nearby island and was closely related to the takahē.

French biochemist Michel Raynal has researched the koao extensively since 1980 and suggests that Gauguin witnessed a dog catch a koao in 1902. That would explain why the dog in his painting is biting the bird’s back or wing. If the bird Heyerdahl saw in 1937 was also a koao, we can determine that it was still alive at that time.

The koao may be extinct now, but at least we have a painting of it. That’s more than we have for most extinct animals.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading:

New species of extinct vampire-squid-like cephalopod

When teeth grow on the body

Fossil shark turns into mystery pterosaur

Scientists Had Never Seen This Elusive Whale Alive—Until Now

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This month I wasn’t sure what to cover in this episode, so I decided to just click on four random bookmarks of scientific articles that I’ve had waiting for attention, and we’ll discuss them. We haven’t done a four articles episode in a long time!

The first article is from March 2022, and it’s about the discovery of an ancient cephalopod. Cephalopods include octopuses and squid. Octopuses famously have eight arms, while squid have eight arms and two feeding tentacles. Despite its name, the deep-sea vampire squid is actually more closely related to octopuses than to squid, and a newly discovered fossil is an ancestor to both.

The fossil is 328 million years old and was discovered in Montana, in the United States, in 1988 but was only studied recently. Fossils of soft-bodied animals are incredibly rare, and this one is remarkably well-preserved. All of the animal’s arms are preserved, including the suckers, but instead of eight arms, it had ten.

Scientists have long suspected that the ancestors of modern octopuses and vampire squid had ten arms. The vampire squid has eight arms and two feeding filaments that are vestigial arms. But this is the first fossil found that shows ten arms.

The fossil is of an animal with a torpedo-like body shaped like a modern squid. Two of its arms appear to be elongated compared to its other arms. It’s about 4 and a half inches long including its arms, or 12 cm. That’s pretty much all we know about it now, but hopefully the fossil will reveal more information as it continues to be studied.

Our next article is from October 2017 and is intriguingly titled “When teeth grow on the body.” It sounds horrific, but it’s actually a study of certain catfish that grow bony plates with tiny teeth on their bodies as defense.

Catfish don’t have scales, but some species of denticulate catfish that live in South America grow bony plates that act like armor. Many of these plates are covered in thin little teeth–actual teeth, including enamel and dentin, with pulp inside. They’re called extra-oral teeth, dermal denticles, or odontodes, and the study determined that they appeared about 120 million years ago in ancient catfish that hadn’t yet evolved the bony plates. The teeth regrow when they’re lost, and in some species, males grow larger teeth than females and use them to fight other males. Imagine biting someone without needing to open your mouth.

Our next article is from November 2020, about more fossils. The fossils were discovered in a collection at the Sedgwick Museum of Cambridge and the Booth Museum at Brighton in England, and were originally found in the latter half of the 19th century by miners. A PhD student at the University of Portsmouth was studying fossilized shark spines from the collection when he realized they weren’t actually shark spines. Instead, they were jaw fragments from pterosaurs.

Pterosaurs were flying reptiles that filled many ecological niches that birds fill today. One of the species identified from the collection is called Ornithostoma, which means bird mouth, an animal that lived in the early Cretaceous, about 110 million years ago, in what is now Europe. We know very little about it except that it didn’t have teeth, but it probably ate fish.

But there were some other jaw fragments that didn’t belong to Ornithostoma, and in fact don’t match up to any known pterosaur jaws. It may belong to a new species, but the fossils are so fragmentary that there’s no way to know for sure. The rocks that the fossils came from were completely destroyed more than a century ago during phosphate mining, so unless more fragments are found in other collections, we may never learn more about this mystery pterosaur.

Our last article is from July 2022, and I have no idea why I haven’t talked about it on the podcast before now. It’s about Sato’s beaked whale, also called kurotsuchi. It’s a type of four-toothed whale with a short beak, and it’s dark gray and can grow up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters. It was only identified in 2016 as being different from the two other known species of four-toothed whales, after careful analysis, including DNA analysis, of dead individuals that had been found washed ashore.

Until the summer of 2021, no one had ever seen a living Sato’s beaked whale. Then some researchers studying orcas spotted 14 of the beaked whales swimming together between Hokkaido, Japan and the Kuril Islands. The scientists recognized that these were unusual whales and they were able to get a small skin sample from one. Genetic testing confirmed that they were indeed Sato’s beaked whales.

Researchers think the whales may spend at least part of the year in tropical waters, since that’s where cookie cutter sharks live and the whales show circular bite scars from cookie cutter sharks. Not much is known about most species of beaked whale, and Sato’s beaked whale is especially mysterious. But at least we know it’s alive and well right now.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!