The Secret Deepwater Lives of Beaked Whales

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BBeaked whales, so named because of their long snouts, are one of the least studied marine mammals because they spend a lot of time feeding in the depths. Their dives can last more than two hours, during which they can descend to nearly 10,000 feet. Even when beaked whales surface to breathe, they remain elusive because their blowholes project water more forward than vertically. An article published yesterday in PLOS OneHowever, gleaned information about beaked whales off the coast of Louisiana by tracking their sounds for six months.

Several species of beaked whales, all in the family Ziphiidae, inhabit the Gulf of Mexico, including goose-beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris), by Gervais (European Mesoplodon), that of Blaineville (Mesoplodon densirostris), and possibly that of Sowerby (Mesoplodon bidens) beaked whales.

Researchers from the University of Miami and NOAA studied beaked whales by listening to their hunting conversations. When searching for fish and cephalopods, whales continually emit echolocation clicks. Two 4-channel high-frequency acoustic recording arrays were deployed at approximately 3,600 feet depth, producing 3D recordings. In this passive tracking mode, species could be distinguished by their species-specific click frequencies.

Read more: “Hunting for the Most Elusive Whale”

Typically, whale behavior is studied through active monitoring, using equipment such as whale-towed hydrophones, which are expensive to deploy. One of the advantages of passive tracking is obtaining much larger sample sizes. Although you also can’t track individual behavior, the range of recording programs in this study allowed triangulation to assess the distribution of individuals according to the depth and direction of their movements.

The recordings revealed three species feeding off the coast of Louisiana: goose-beaked, Blainville’s and Gervais’ whales. For the latter, this study constitutes the first detailed description of their movements up and down the water column. Over the 200 days of recording, goose-beaked whale clicks were detected in 29 events, Gervais’ beaked whale clicks in 54 events, and Blainville’s beaked whale clicks in two events. Goose-beaked whales and Blainville’s beaked whales often swam alone, while Gervais’s beaked whales were in groups of at least two individuals.

The researchers reconstructed the diving whales’ individual trajectories from their clicks using an existing toolkit called Where is Whaledo. They found that Gervais’ beaked whales’ dives were significantly shorter and shallower than those of goose-beaked whales. This finding could signal variation in feeding behavior among beaked whale species.

“Acoustic tracking is a reliable alternative to tagging for studying the acoustic and diving behavior of elusive beaked whales in the Gulf,” the study authors concluded. Their estimates of diving depths, swimming speeds, direction and inclination of movement, and foraging time were consistent with values ​​found using other methods. Acoustic monitoring also provided new information on the behavior of Gervais’s beaked whale.

Sometimes just being a good listener pays off.

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Main image: Andrea Izzotti / Shutterstock

• Devin Reese

  Published on February 5, 2026

  Devin Reese is the editor-in-chief of Natural history and a science writer based in Alexandria, Virginia.