How a researcher discovered a completely undocumented whale
Wednesday, November 30, 2016 - 07:01
in Biology & Nature
One evening in November 2013, the noted whale researcher Salvatore Cerchio sat down to dinner with his team of scientists on Nosy Iranja, a small island known for its white sands and turquoise waters that's located off the northwest coast of Madagascar. As he took his seat, Cerchio could barely contain his excitement. He'd spent the better part a decade working in the general region of Madagascar, heading up research into the local population of dolphins and whales with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and he was pretty sure that, earlier in the day, he and his team had encountered six Bryde's whales, an exceedingly rare cousin of the humpback.