©Bryan Kao
October 28, 2025
Legends of the Deep
- as seen by -
Bryan Kao
Even after millennia of human civilization, sailing and exploring the oceans, we’ve barely scratched the surface. There remain plenty of sea creatures we haven’t discovered yet, and also plenty of sea creatures we don’t know enough about because we don’t see them very often. Beaked whales, family Ziphiidae, belong in the latter category. Resembling larger and more rotund dolphins due to their beaked snouts, these mysterious whales uniquely grow tusks in their jaws, which males use to deal gnarly battle scars on each other’s hides. Also bizarre is that their blubber is made of wax.
With their cool appearances and lifestyles, beaked whales are unfortunately super challenging to see, let alone study. Some species can hold their breath for an hour or longer and plunge to depths of a mile or more below the surface, making them the best mammalian submarines. Pods of beaked whales spend most of their time feasting on squid and other prey in deep trenches. When they surface for air, they are typically super shy and skittish, keeping most of their bodies underwater and fleeing downward at the first sight of a human vessel, never to be seen again.
Pico Island in the Azores, an Atlantic Ocean archipelago belonging to Portugal, is a biodiversity hotspot for migratory whales, and late July is usually when the number of species encountered by whale watches reaches its annual peak. On a five-day trip with Espaço Talassa, the Azores’s oldest whale watching company, my mammal watching team and I were beyond words to encounter Sowerby’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon bidens) on six out of ten boat trips, and even saw some breaching. Distinguishable from other beaked whales of the North Atlantic by their long beaks, Sowerby’s beaked whales are sometimes willing to swim close to shore in Pico due to the deep trenches right on the coastline. Eagle-eyed spotters in a watchtower called our boat when they spied the whales surfacing, and our skipper turned the boat engine off for stealth as we approached the pods.
In this instance, I captured the moment when a female Sowerby’s beaked whale glided out of the still, waveless ocean surface with a backdrop of several villages, showing the magic of this island.
NIKON D5500
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