Perhaps not since Captain Ahab has one man looked so long for a whale.

It’s been 14 years since Bob Pitman set out to find an unusual-looking type of killer whale. It had been officially spotted only a few times before. In 1955, a strange pod washed up on a beach north of Wellington, New Zealand. Their black-and-white coloration quickly identified them as killer whales (which are members of the dolphin family), but their snub noses, narrow, pointy fins and small patches of white near their eyes made it clear that these were not typical orcas.

Scientists thought they were perhaps the offspring of one female with genetic aberrations. Then in 2005, a team of French scientists confirmed seeing killer whales with similar characteristics off the Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean.

Mr. Pitman, a marine ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has been looking for those so-called Type D killer whales ever since. Unlike Herman Melville’s fictional sea captain, Mr. Pitman’s quest was aimed at answering scientific questions: Who are these orcas, how are they different from other killer whales and do they constitute a new species?

He’s finally beginning to get answers.

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