Population and Distribution
The two species' ranges do not overlap. This is perhaps the most significant reason they have historically been treated as separate species.
Arnoux's inhabit great tracts of the Southern Ocean. Beachings in New Zealand and Argentina indicate the whale is relatively common in the areas south of those countries south to Antarctica. It has also been spotted close to South Georgia and South Africa, indicating a likely circumpolar distribution. The northernmost stranding was at 34 degrees south, indicating the whales inhabit cool and temperate, as well as polar, waters.
Baird's beaked whale is found in the North Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Japan and the southern part of the Sea of Okhotsk. They appear to prefer seas over steep cliffs at the edge of the continental shelf. Specimens have been recorded as far north as the Bering Sea and as far south as the Baja California Peninsula on the east side and the southern islands of Japan on the west.
The total population is not known for either species. Estimates for Baird's are of the order of 30,000 individuals.
Read more about this topic: Giant Beaked Whale
Famous quotes containing the words population and/or distribution:
“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)