The whale in this Vinalhaven video is even more rare than we realized

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • July 3, 2023

The whale video provided recently by Jay Borden, a summer resident of Vinalhaven, created quite a stir. we incorrectly identified as a minke whale. According to Christopher Tremblay, a whale biologist at the University of Maine, was the first to recognize that the whale was actually a pygmy sperm whale. “They are not common visitors to this area, and the video provided is absolutely wonderful, but it is definitely not a minke whale, and instead from an entirely different sub-order,” said Capt. Toby Stephenson, Director of Marine Resources at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, in confirming the pygmy sperm whale identification.