Revised 1/20/2012 FALSE KILLER WHALE (Pseudorca crassidens): Pacific Islands Region Stock Complex- Hawaii Insular

• Main Authors: Hawaii Pelagic, Palmyra Atoll Stocks
• 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=10.1.1.432.1761; http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/sars/po2011whfk-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 2005). One on-effort sighting of false killer whales was made during a 2002 shipboard survey, and six during the 2010 shipboard survey of waters within the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Hawaiian Islands (Figure 1; Barlow 2006, NMFS unpublished data). Group size ranged from 1 to 52 false killer whales during the 2010 survey. 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