A 38-foot-long (11.5-meter) whale that washed up in the Florida Everglades in January 2019 is proving to be an entirely new species. And it is already considered endangered, scientists say.
When the behemoth’s corpse washed up past Sandy Key – underweight with a hard piece of plastic in its gut – scientists believed it was a subspecies of the Bryde’s (pronounced ‘broodus’) whale, a baleen whale in the same group that also includes humpback whales and blue whales. That subspecies was called Rice’s whale.
Now, after genetic analysis of other Rice whales along with an examination of the Everglades whale’s skull, researchers believe the Rice whale, rather than a subspecies, is an entirely new species living in the Gulf of Mexico.
The discovery, detailed Jan. 10 in the journal Marine Mammal Science, also means that fewer than 100 members of this species live on the planet, making them “critically endangered,” according to a statement by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
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According to the study, the researchers looked at data from the Bryde’s whale in the Caribbean and the greater Atlantic Ocean and concluded that the whales they saw were evidence “of an undescribed species of Balaenoptera from the Gulf of Mexico.”
The study’s lead author Patricia Rosel and her co-author, Lynsey Wilcox, both of the Southeast Fisheries Science Center, completed the first genetic testing of this whale in 2008 and found that the rice whale’s skull was different from that of the whales from Bryde.
In addition to having different skulls, Rice’s whales are slightly different in size from Bryde’s whales, the new analysis showed. They can weigh up to 60,000 pounds (27,215 kilograms) and grow up to 42 feet (12.8 meters) long, according to NOAA, while Bryde’s whales are known to reach over 50 feet (15.2 m) and over 55,000 pounds weigh (24,947 kg).
Rosel and her colleagues think the whales in the new species could live for about 60 years, but since there are so few, researchers need closer observation of the whales to get a better idea of their life expectancy.
Given their location in the Gulf of Mexico, Rice’s whales are particularly vulnerable to oil spills, ship attacks and energy exploration and production, NOAA added.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.