A San Diego scientist who led an expedition into dangerous waters off Chile collected tissue samples that could prove the existence of a graceful new species of killer whale, ending decades of mystery.

Robert Pitman of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SFSC) in La Jolla gathered the samples in January from three of the animals, which some researchers believe are the largest scientifically unidentified animals on Earth.

The samples will be brought to SFSC so scientists can genetically determine if the rarely seen whales, known as Type D, are different from other orcas.

“I could be wrong, but these Type D animals are radically different from other killer whales,” said Pitman, the expedition’s principal investigator.


“Their bodies are more cylindrical than the kind of killer whales you see at Sea World. Their head is bulbous. And their dorsal fin is pointy and narrow at the base.”

The Type D are also believed to be smaller than other types of killer whales, although that fact has yet to be confirmed.

Fishermen, ecotourists and naturalists traveling in the Southern Ocean (also known as the Antarctic Ocean) have seeing and photographing Type D orcas for years. But the expedition represents the first time scientists collected DNA samples from the creatures.


The achievement, announced Thursday, was made by researchers from the U.S., Canada, Argentina and Australia.The scientists included one of Pitman’s colleagues at SFSC, conservation biologist Lisa Ballance, who said, “This was a high-risk project in some of the roughest seas on Earth.

“We didn’t know whether we’d find the whales at all. We laid at anchor in 40 to 60 knot winds for eight days before there was a brief break in the weather and we encountered 25 to 30 of them for several hours.

“It was intense and extraordinary.”

Pitman organized the expedition after hearing continued reports that the Type D whales were spotted in the Southern Ocean, especially by long-line fishermen. The animals trailed their boats and sometimes stole fish off their lines.


The researchers went out to sea in early January aboard the 72-foot research vessel Australis, departing Cape Horn, Chile. The port is almost 7,000 miles southeast of San Diego.

They found a pod of the whales 150 miles southwest of Cape Horn early on the morning of Jan. 19th, in a moment of extraordinary exuberance.


“We got to see this virtually unknown type of whale for about 3.5 hours, during which we took thousands of photographs and did underwater videography,” said Ballance, who also is an adjunct professor at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“We also used a hydrophone to record their sounds.”

The researchers used a crossbow to fire tiny non-lethal probes into the blubber of the whales. The probes are designed to immediately pop out with a sample of the animal’s tissue. The samples were retrieved from the sea.

Type D killer whales appear to have been unknown to humans until 1955, when 17 of them became stranded on a beach in New Zealand, NOAA says.


“Compared to other killer whales, they had more rounded heads; a narrower and more pointed dorsal fin, and a tiny white eye patch,” NOAA said in a statement. “No whales like this had ever been described before.”

For decades, researchers thought the whales might be a genetic aberration that was seen in stranded whales. But in 2005, a French scientist showed Pitman photos of what were believed to be Type D whales that had raided commercial fishing lines in the southern Indian Ocean, NOAA says.

That suggested that the whales were more abundant and widespread than previously believed.

Pitman began a 14-year effort to find, study and sample the whales, a quest that came to fruition in mid-January.


“It felt like we were out there chasing our tails,” said Pitman, who is married to Ballance. “Then the boat’s captain spotted them and we got in close. I remember thinking how small they were.

“Its amazing that we found them. They live in the worst weather on Earth, in the open ocean. If you were going to hide a large animal, that is where you’d put it.”