These rare whales had never been seen alive. Then a team in Mexico sighted two

"I can't even describe the feeling because it was something that we had worked towards for so long, says Elizabeth Henderson, a researcher at the US military's Naval Information Warfare Center and lead author of the resulting paper published in Marine Mammal Science, who was also there that day. Everybody on the boat was cheering because we had it, we finally had it."

"The Pacific Storm towed an array of hydrophones to listen to the distinctive calls of different pods of whales. Photograph: Marine Mammal Institute/Oregon State University The discovery had been five years in the making. Since 2020, Henderson and her colleagues from Mexico and the US had been tracking a group of whales producing a distinctive call, tagged as BW43, which they initially thought was Perrin's beaked whale, another species that had never been seen in the wild."

"Suddenly a call came from the bridge: Whales! Starboard side! For the next few hours, what looked like a couple of juvenile beaked whales kept surfacing and disappearing until finally Robert Pitman, a now-retired researcher at Oregon State University, fired a small arrow from a modified crossbow at the back of one of them. Everybody on the boat was cheering we finally had it Elizabeth Henderson"

Scientists tracking a distinct whale call labeled BW43 since 2020 used an Oregon State research vessel and a towed hydrophone array to relocate elusive beaked whales off Baja California. After multiple unsuccessful seasons, researchers encountered juveniles in June 2024 and obtained a small skin sample using a modified crossbow biopsy. The biopsy sample provided the evidence needed to confirm the animals as gingko‑toothed beaked whales, a species not previously observed alive in the wild. The effort involved collaborators from Mexico and the US and combined acoustic monitoring with targeted fieldwork.

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