First Record of a Blainville’s Beaked Whale (Mesoplodon densirostris) in Cuba

The Ziphiidae family (beaked whales) is poorly known in comparison to other cetaceans (MacLeod et al., 2006). Since sea surface observations of these odontocetes are generally brief and in poorly accessible locations, a large amount of their biological information is obtained from strandings (e.g., MacLeod et al., 2003; Whitt et al., 2011; Bachara et al., 2020). The Blainville’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon densirostris; BBW) is no exception with several stranding records throughout the world, including South Africa (Pringle, 1963), Tasmania (Guiler, 1966), Brazil (Castello & Pinedo, 1980), the Cayman Islands (Rosario-Delestre et al., 1999), Canada (McAlpine & Rae, 1999), New Caledonia (Borsa & Robineau, 2005), Fiji (Leslie et al., 2005), The Netherlands (Camphuysen et al., 2008), Ecuador (Félix et al., 2011), Kenya (Valle, 2012), Southeast Asia (Bachara et al., 2015), the Philippines (Bachara & Blatchley, 2018), El Salvador (Bachara et al., 2020), and the Mexican Central Pacific (Ortega-Ortiz et al.,