A Longman's beaked whale (Indopacetus pacificus) strands in Maui, Hawaii, with first case of morbillivirus in the central Pacific

West, K. L., Sanchez, S., Rotstein, D., Robertson, K. M., Dennison, S., Levine, G., Davis, N., Schofield, D., Potter, C. W. and Jensen, B. (2012), A Longman's beaked whale (Indopacetus pacificus) strands in Maui, Hawaii, with first case of morbillivirus in the central Pacific. Marine Mammal Science. doi: 10.1111/j.1748-7692.2012.00616.x

Author Information

1 College of Natural and Computational Sciences, Hawai'i Pacific University, Kaneohe, Hawaii, U.S.A

2 Department of Infectious Diseases, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, U.S.A

3 Olney, Maryland, U.S.A

4 Protected Resources Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Services, NOAA, La Jolla, California, U.S.A

5 Marine Mammal Radiology, San Francisco, California, U.S.A

6 Kailua, Hawaii, U.S.A

7 Pacific Islands Regional Office, National Marine Fisheries Service, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A

8 Department of Vertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, U.S.A

*Corresponding author (e-mail: kwest@hpu.edu).

Article first published online: 9 OCT 2012

Marine Mammal Science

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1748-7692.2012.00616.x/full

The Longman's beaked whale (Indopacetus pacificus) is one of the world's most poorly known whales. Until 1999 this species had not been identified from either a live or a dead whale and was known only from the holotype skull collected from Queensland, Australia in 1882 (Longman 1926) and one additional skull from Somalia (Azzaroli 1968). After a detailed assessment of photographs of an unidentified tropical “bottlenose whale” (Pitman et al. 1999), and later genetic confirmation of species identity from stranded animals (Dalebout et al. 2003), at sea identification of this species became possible and sighting reports are no longer uncommon in subtropical and tropical waters, especially in the Indian Ocean (Pitman et al. 1999, Anderson et al. 2006). In the Pacific, a few sighting reports suggest that Longman's beaked whales inhabit Hawaiian waters in low abundance (Shallenberger 1981, Barlow 2006, McSweeney et al. 2007). However, specimens remain scarce and to date this species is known from less than 10 confirmed strandings world-wide (Pitman 2009). This is the first report on a stranding and necropsy findings from a Longman's beaked whale from the Hawaiian archipelago and confirms the presence of this species in waters of the United States. This is the only case of a Longman's beaked whale stranding world-wide where the response included collection of morphometrics, computed tomography (CT) scanning, gross necropsy, histopathology, genetics, and molecular diagnostics for pathogens.