Over 10 years back, Salvatore Cerchio visited Madagascar for a research over coastal dolphins. However, with time his attention shifted to a quite bigger marine mammal, an uncommon whale species that lives in those waters.

Cerchio works for the New England Aquarium, and he found Omura’s whale in 2013 in waters off the island nation. Last year, his team had 80 sightings of the whale. A large part of the work done during that time period was focused on better understanding of the behavior of a whale that before 2003 was by mistake thought to be a sort of identical species, the Bryde's whale.

While speaking to FoxNews.com, Cerchio said, “When we found them, we thought they were Bryde's in part because they weren’t supposed to be in this area. The known range of Omura’s whales at that point was the western Pacific and the far eastern Indian Ocean off of Australia”.

He continued that after finding Omura’s whale several times in Madagascar, they recorded some pretty good underwater footage and analyzed it. Then, it occurred in their mind that these weren’t Bryde's whales at all but in reality were Omura’s whales.

He mentioned that the moment they realized they were Omura’s whales, they faced many challenges as none of them had studied this species earlier. They hadn’t seen them or documented them in the wild and they weren’t expected in Madagascar. He added that the work done by them has expanded their range notably.

Cerchio released the first footage of the whale in the wild in October, and has most recently come up with new data about the feeding and breeding behavior of the 33- to 38-foot mammals. They realized that the whales have been eating levels of ‘tiny shrimp’ called euphasiids, being found in the water.

He said that their excitement has had no bounds when they managed to get more information on the mammal’s feeding than they had ever before.