Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia > Cetacea > Hyperoodontidae > Mesoplodon > Mesoplodon densirostris

Mesoplodon densirostris (Blainville's Beaked Whale; densebeak whale; dense-beaked whale)

Synonyms:
Language: Spanish

Wikipedia Abstract

Blainville's beaked whale (Mesoplodon densirostris), or the dense-beaked whale, is the widest ranging mesoplodont whale and perhaps the most documented. The French zoologist Henri de Blainville first described the species in 1817 from a small piece of jaw — the heaviest bone he had ever come across — which resulted in the name densirostris (Latin for "dense beak"). Off the northeastern Bahamas, the animals are particularly well documented, and a photo identification project started sometime after 2002.
View Wikipedia Record: Mesoplodon densirostris

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

Litter Size [3]  1
Maximum Longevity [3]  27 years
Snout to Vent Length [3]  15.547 feet (474 cm)
Water Biome [1]  Coastal
Adult Weight [2]  1.199 tons (1,088.00 kg)
Birth Weight [3]  132.278 lbs (60.00 kg)
Diet [4]  Carnivore (Invertebrates), Piscivore
Diet - Fish [4]  20 %
Diet - Invertibrates [4]  80 %
Forages - Marine [4]  100 %
Female Maturity [2]  9 years
Male Maturity [3]  9 years

Protected Areas

Prey / Diet

Histioteuthis reversa (Reverse Jewell Squid)[5]
Pterygosquilla armata[5]
Taonius pavo[6]

Prey / Diet Overlap

Consumers

Parasitized by 
Bolbosoma vasculosum[7]
Hysterothylacium rigidum[7]
Phyllobothrium delphini[7]

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
♦ 2de Magalhaes, J. P., and Costa, J. (2009) A database of vertebrate longevity records and their relation to other life-history traits. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 22(8):1770-1774
♦ 3Nathan 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
♦ 4Hamish 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
♦ 5Niche Partitioning, Distribution And Competition In North Atlantic Beaked Whales, Colin D. MacLeod, A thesis submitted to the School of Biological Sciences for a degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK. January 2005
♦ 6Insights into the diet of beaked whales from the atypical mass stranding in the Canary Islands in September 2002, M.B. Santos, V. Martin, M. Arbelo, A. Fernández and G.J. Pierce, J. Mar. Biol. Ass. U.K. (2007), 87, 243–251
♦ 7Gibson, 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