Massimiliano Rosso is a senior researcher at the CIMA Research Foundation in Savona Italy.

Cuvier’s beaked whale (Ziphius cavirostris G. Cuvier, 1823) is the only beaked whale species commonly found in the Mediterranean Sea. Until recently, species presence in this area was only inferred from stranding events. The Mediterranean population of Cuvier’s beaked whale is genetically distinct from the Atlantic, and subject to a number of conservation threats, in particular underwater noise. Dedicated cetacean surveys in the NW Mediterranean Sea have started in 2002 increasing the knowledge of the distribution and abundance of Cuvier’s beaked whales in the basin, even though many areas still remain unexplored. The talk will present an updated analysis of available sighting, mark-recapture and stranding data, focusing on the atypical mass strandings that have occurred in the Mediterranean Sea since 1963. Data from the NW Mediterranean Sea have been analyzed for habitat modelling studies for that area, confirming the species preference for the continental slope and its particular association with submarine canyons, as has also been found to be the case in other areas of the world. Using a robust dataset, population size has been estimated for the Ligurian sea and the photo-id data have been used to study the natural marking on this specie and to create a reliable sex identification method using natural marking patterns.