One of the world’s most unusual colored dolphins is found in Australia.
Speckles, a spotted black-and-white bottlenose dolphin, surprised researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast, based in Hervey Bay, a Whale Heritage Site on the Queensland coast.
“It was almost the end of the day, we were almost in and we saw this big jump, this big splash so we thought we’d go and investigate,” researcher Georgina Humes told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The team determined that Speckles is an extremely rare piebald dolphin, having a genetic mutation that causes a partial loss of pigmentation, resulting in its unique coloring.
Common bottlenose dolphins are gray in color.
“We don’t know if it’s male or female, we believe it has a genetic mutation,” Hume said of Speckles, who has a prominent dorsal fin and white stripes on his body and belly.
“It’s quite exciting, we looked at it and we found that no one had really documented any sightings of these piebald dolphins in Australia.”
Speckles, a spotted black-and-white dolphin surprised researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast, who are at the Hervey Bay Whale Heritage Site. Georgina Hume The team determined that Speckles is an extremely rare piebald dolphin, having a genetic mutation that causes a partial loss of pigmentation, resulting in its unique coloring. Georgina Hume “It’s quite exciting, we looked at it and we found that nobody had ever really documented any sightings of these piebald dolphins in Australia,” researcher Georgina Humes. Georgina Hume
The spots were spotted in September 2022 and since then, researchers have been looking into how rare the find is.
They know it is one of six cases in the world where photographic evidence of a piebald dolphin has been taken and only the second to be recorded in the entire southern hemisphere.
“I’ve been working in this field for about 15 years across three different continents and I’ve never seen it myself so once we brought the picture back it was quite an exciting evening for us,” University of the Sunshine Coast ecologist Alexis Levengood told the outlet.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
