Marine mammal records of Cuba

Occurrence Observation
Latest version published by OBIS-SEAMAP on Oct 8, 2025 OBIS-SEAMAP
Home:
https://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/1190
Publication date:
8 October 2025
Published by:
OBIS-SEAMAP
License:
CC-BY 4.0

Download the latest version of this resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:

Data as a DwC-A file download 675 records in English (54 KB) - Update frequency: not planned
Metadata as an EML file download in English (21 KB)
Metadata as an RTF file download in English (13 KB)

Description

Original provider: Amy Whitt Dataset credits: Amy Whitt Abstract: There has been very little research on marine mammals in Cuban waters. Much of the information on marine mammals in this region is buried in historical and gray literature. In order to provide a comprehensive account of marine mammal occurrence in Cuba’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), we reviewed and verified 659 published and unpublished sighting, stranding, capture, and tagging records. Eighteen extant species and four genera have confirmed records for Cuban EEZ waters. This includes 17 species of cetaceans (three baleen whales and 14 toothed whales) and one sirenian species. An additional 11 cetacean species and one extant pinniped species have been reported, but not confirmed, or may have the potential to occur in Cuban waters. Historical records of the Caribbean monk seal (<i>Monachus tropicalis</i>) are documented in Cuba; however, this species is now considered extinct. The only two species that are seen regularly and considered common in Cuban nearshore waters are the common bottlenose dolphin (<i>Tursiops truncatus</i>) and the West Indian manatee (<i>Trichechus manatus</i>).

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 675 records.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Whitt, A. 2023. Marine mammal records of Cuba. Version 1.7.0. Dataset published in OBIS-SEAMAP. https://doi.org/10.82144/d52e37d1.

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is OBIS-SEAMAP. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 28bf3cf9-3d61-4548-8a73-9a0423e45896.  OBIS-SEAMAP publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Ocean Biodiversity Information System.

Keywords

Occurrence; Observation; Marine Biology; Visual sighting; Marine Animal Survey; Marine mammals; Visual Sighting; Various; Strandings; Sightings; Captures; Occurrence

External data

The resource data is also available in other formats

OBIS-SEAMAP Dataset Page https://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/1190 UTF-8 Interactive map
FGDC Metadata https://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/1190/fgdc UTF-8 XML
EML Metadata https://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/1190/eml UTF-8 XML

Contacts

Amy Whitt
  • Owner ●
  • Originator ●
  • Point Of Contact
  • Primary contact
Azura Consulting LLC
OBIS-SEAMAP
  • Metadata Provider ●
  • Distributor
Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, Duke University
  • A328 LSRC building
27708 Durham
NC
US

Geographic Coverage

Oceans,Caribbean,Cuba

Bounding Coordinates South West [19, -86.746], North East [25.05, -73.567]

Taxonomic Coverage

Scientific names are based on the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS).

Order Cetacea (Cetaceans)
Suborder Caniformia (Pinnipeds)
Family Delphinidae (Dolphins)
Genus Balaenoptera (Baleen whales), Globicephala (Pilot whales), Kogia (Pygmy sperm whales), Mesoplodon (Beaked whales), Stenella (Spinner dolphins)
Species Balaenoptera acutorostrata (Common minke whale), Balaenoptera brydei (Bryde's whale), Balaenoptera physalus (Fin whale), Globicephala macrorhynchus (Short-finned pilot whale), Grampus griseus (Risso's dolphin), Kogia breviceps (Pygmy sperm whale), Kogia sima (Dwarf sperm whale), Megaptera novaeangliae (Humpback whale), Mesoplodon densirostris (Blainville's beaked whale), Mesoplodon europaeus (Gervais' beaked whale), Monachus tropicalis (Caribbean monk seal), Orcinus orca (Killer whale), Physeter macrocephalus (Sperm whale), Pseudorca crassidens (False killer whale), Stenella attenuata (Pantropical spotted dolphin), Stenella frontalis (Atlantic spotted dolphin), Stenella longirostris (Spinner dolphin), Steno bredanensis (Rough-toothed dolphin), Trichechus manatus (West indian manatee), Tursiops truncatus (Common bottlenose dolphin), Ziphius cavirostris (Cuvier's beaked whale)

Temporal Coverage

Start Date / End Date 1520-01-01 / 2008-10-14

Project Data

No Description available

Title Marine mammal records of Cuba
Funding NA

The personnel involved in the project:

Amy Whitt
  • Owner

Sampling Methods

NA

Study Extent NA

Method step description:

  1. NA

Collection Data

Collection Name zd_1190
Collection Identifier zd_1190
Parent Collection Identifier OBIS-SEAMAP

Bibliographic Citations

  1. Whitt, A.D., Jefferson, T.A., Blanco, M., Fertl, D., and Rees, D. 2011. A review of marine mammal records of Cuba. Latin American Journal of Aquatic Mammals: 9(2): 65-122.

Additional Metadata

marine, harvested by iOBIS. The temporal precision varies among records and most of the records do not have times (except those from satellite tag detections). Some of the lat/long had to be estimated because exact locations were not available. For each record, there is a note describing the locations that are exact. As for the estimated lat/long, we estimated some of these just by finding the lat/long of the general location that was mentioned with the record. For some others, we georeferenced the coordinates from old figures of sightings/strandings since the raw data were not available.

Purpose
Alternative Identifiers https://doi.org/10.82144/d52e37d1
https://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/1190
https://www.gbif.org/dataset/28bf3cf9-3d61-4548-8a73-9a0423e45896
https://obis.org/dataset/331444c9-952b-4365-8afa-c4bf38f6a2ef
28bf3cf9-3d61-4548-8a73-9a0423e45896
https://ipt.env.duke.edu/resource?r=zd_1190