Revised 1/8/2013 FALSE KILLER WHALE (Pseudorca crassidens): Hawaiian Islands Stock Complex – Main Hawaiian Islands Insular, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and Hawaii Pelagic Stocks

• Main Authors: Stock Definition, Geographic Range
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Pacific; Killer Whale
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.294.7973; http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/sars/po2012whfk-isl.pdf

False killer whales are found worldwide mainly in tropical and warmtemperate waters (Stacey et al. 1994). In the North Pacific, this species is well known from southern Japan, Hawaii, and the eastern tropical Pacific. There are six stranding records from Hawaiian waters (Nitta 1991; Maldini et al. 2005). One on-effort sighting of false killer whales was made during a 2002 shipboard survey, and six during a 2010 shipboard survey of waters within the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Hawaiian Islands (Figure 1; Barlow 2006, Bradford et al. 2012). Smaller-scale surveys conducted around the main Hawaiian Islands (Figure 2) show that false killer whales are also encountered in nearshore waters (Baird et al. 2005, Mobley et al. 2000), and a single oneffort and three off-effort sightings during a 2010 shipboard survey reveal that the species also occurs near shore in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (Baird et al. 2012). This species also occurs in U.S. EEZ waters around