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Mysterious whale sighted
A large group of a rarely sighted, Arnoux's beaked whales have been seen and photographed in the Gerlache Strait, Antarctica. Few sightings of this species are made and even less inshore, it's also the largest group ever recorded with approx 60 whales sighted.
In late May this year, a team of Duke University researchers sighted the whales near the entrance to the Schollaert Channel between Brabant and Cuverville Islands and the researchers said what made the sighting atypical and noteworthy was the size of the group of animals and their surface activity. The animals were spread out linearly and over a few kilometres with most of the whales remaining at the surface socialising in ways more befitting of dolphins, slapping the water with their tails and surfacing rapidly. The researchers, who were aboard the research vessel ARSV LM Gould were initially surveying humpback whales but several days later in June, the research team made a second sighting of Arnoux's beaked whales in the same region, this time of a group of at least 25 animals.
Being sighted in the Gerlache Strait, which contains channels and canyons up to 1,500m deep and is more than 150km from the edge of the continental shelf, suggests the whales may prefer to reside near to shore as much as in the open ocean. As a group, beaked whales are among the least understood large animals on the planet with several only having been discovered in the past couple of decades.
Marine biologists have published details of the sighting in the journal Marine Mammal Science.
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