Hector's Beaked Whale

Hector's beaked whale (Mesoplodon hectori), is a small mesoplodont living in the Southern Hemisphere. This whale is named after Sir James Hector, a founder of the colonial museum in Wellington, New Zealand. Some specimens washed up and been sighted in California and once thought to belong to this species have subsequently been shown through analysis of mtDNA and detailed morhological examination to be a new species, Perrin's beaked whale (Dalebout et al. 2002). The species has rarely been seen in the wild.

Some data supposedly referring to this species, especially juveniles and males, turned out to be based on the misidentified specimens of Perrin's beaked whale - especially since the adult male of Hector's beaked whale was only more recently described. Dalebout et al. (2002) specifically list Mead (1981), Mead (1984), Mead & Baker (1987), Mead (1989), Baker (1990), Jefferson et al. (1993), Mead (1993), Carwardine (1995), Reeves and Leatherwood (1994), Henshaw et al. (1997) and Messenger and McQuire (1998) as erroneously attributing data from the new species to Hector's beaked whale.