Did you know - the United States has its very own whale?

 

Many astute and scholarly readers of the New York Times probably already saw this story.  And since very few, if any, people regularly or occasionally read my blog, I won't be edifying many more, either.  But still, this blog has commonly been about topics that interest me, even if they don't interest anybody else, or if they are so interesting that most of the world has already heard about them before I comment.

But still ... 

It was interesting to me to find out that there's a small population of whales that have made the northern Gulf of Mexico their home, and have become genetically isolated enough to be a separate species.

The flip side to being their own species is that there are very few of them, and that means that in the crowded Gulf of Mexico (oil drilling, shipping, fishing, etc.), they are also very endangered.

America's New Whale is Now at Extinction's Doorstep

If you want, you can look at the paper about it:

A new species of baleen whale (Balaenoptera) from the Gulf of Mexico, with a review of its geographic distribution

It's been named "Rice's whale". 

It has also been written about by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and in Smithsonian Magazine.

Interesting aspect of the second article;  the whale was identified as a new species when a carcass washed up in Florida, and they buried it on the coast near St. Petersburg for a few months before retrieving it and giving it a full examination.

There are several pictures of the dead whale available, the only ones I could be sure were pictures of the new species.  But that seemed kind of sad, so here's a picture from NOAA of a Bryde's whale, which is very similar to Rice's whale, but apparently a bit larger.  That could be due choice of diet and prey availability, I would think.