Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia > Cetacea > Hyperoodontidae > Mesoplodon > Mesoplodon bidens

Mesoplodon bidens (Sowerby's Beaked Whale; North Atlantic beaked whale)

Synonyms:

Wikipedia Abstract

Sowerby's beaked whale (Mesoplodon bidens), also known as the North Atlantic or North Sea beaked whale, is a species of toothed whale. It was the first mesoplodont whale to be described. James Sowerby, an English naturalist and artist, first described the species in 1804 from a skull obtained from a male that had stranded in the Moray Firth, Scotland, in 1800. He named it bidens, which derives from the two teeth present in the jaw, now known to be a very common feature among the genus.
View Wikipedia Record: Mesoplodon bidens

EDGE Analysis

Uniqueness Scale: Similiar (0) 
6
 Unique (100)
Uniqueness & Vulnerability Scale: Not determined do to incomplete vulnerability data.
ED Score: 12.81
Learn more at EDGE of Existence programme

Attributes

Gestation [4]  1 year
Litter Size [4]  1
Snout to Vent Length [4]  16.302 feet (497 cm)
Water Biome [1]  Pelagic
Adult Weight [2]  3.748 tons (3,400.00 kg)
Diet [3]  Carnivore (Invertebrates), Piscivore
Diet - Fish [3]  20 %
Diet - Invertibrates [3]  80 %
Forages - Marine [3]  100 %

Prey / Diet

Diretmus argenteus (discfish)[5]
Electrona risso (Risso's lanternfish)[5]
Opisthoproctus soleatus (Barreleye)[5]

Consumers

Parasitized by 
Bolbosoma vasculosum[6]
Hysterothylacium rigidum[6]
Phyllobothrium delphini[6]
Strobilocephalus triangularis[6]
Tetrabothrius forsteri[6]

Range Map

External References

NatureServe Explorer

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
♦ 1Myers, P., R. Espinosa, C. S. Parr, T. Jones, G. S. Hammond, and T. A. Dewey. 2006. The Animal Diversity Web (online). Accessed February 01, 2010 at animaldiversity.org
♦ 2Felisa A. Smith, S. Kathleen Lyons, S. K. Morgan Ernest, Kate E. Jones, Dawn M. Kaufman, Tamar Dayan, Pablo A. Marquet, James H. Brown, and John P. Haskell. 2003. Body mass of late Quaternary mammals. Ecology 84:3403
♦ 3Hamish Wilman, Jonathan Belmaker, Jennifer Simpson, Carolina de la Rosa, Marcelo M. Rivadeneira, and Walter Jetz. 2014. EltonTraits 1.0: Species-level foraging attributes of the world's birds and mammals. Ecology 95:2027
♦ 4Nathan P. Myhrvold, Elita Baldridge, Benjamin Chan, Dhileep Sivam, Daniel L. Freeman, and S. K. Morgan Ernest. 2015. An amniote life-history database to perform comparative analyses with birds, mammals, and reptiles. Ecology 96:3109
♦ 5Diet of mid-Atlantic Sowerby’s beaked whales Mesoplondon bidens, J.N. Pereira, V.C. Neves, R. Prieto, M.A. Silva, I. Cascão, C. Oliveira, M.J. Cruz, J.V. Medeiros, J.P. Barreiros, F.M. Porteiro, D. Clarke, Deep-Sea Research I 58 (2011) 1084–1090
♦ 6Gibson, D. I., Bray, R. A., & Harris, E. A. (Compilers) (2005). Host-Parasite Database of the Natural History Museum, London
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0