Sato's beaked whale: A new cetacean species discovered around Japan
Robert L. Brownell, Toshio Kasuya
Abstract
A new cetacean species discovered around Japan Of the 91 known species of living cetaceans, 25% are beaked whales in the Family Ziphiidae (n = 23). Most beaked whales are cryptic and difficult to study because they are deep divers, spend very little time on the surface, and difficult to approach with a vessel. The first beaked whale was described in 1770, when Johann Reinhold Forster, the naturalist on Captain James Cook's second voyage, named Hyperoodon ampullatus based on a whale that stranded in 1717 at Maldon, Essex, England. By the start of the 19th century, 12 additional beaked whales had been discovered and named. Eight new species were discovered during the 20th century and one more since 2000. The newest ziphiid, Berardius minimus, was reported from Hokkaido, Japan (Yamada et al., 2019). Two beaked whale genera, Hyperoodon and Berardius, have an antitropical distribution. The northern bottlenose whale, Hyperoodon ampullatus, is found in the cold-temperate waters of the North Atlantic and the southern bottlenose whale, Hyperoodon