One of the world’s rarest colored dolphins has been discovered in Australia.
Speckles, a spotted black and white bottlenose dolphin, surprised University of the Sunshine Coast researchers at Hervey Bay, a whale heritage site on the Queensland coast.
“It was nearing the end of the day and we were about to leave, and we saw this huge jump and this huge splash, so we decided to go and investigate,” researcher Georgina Humes said. Georgina Humes said. told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The research team determined that Speckles is an extremely rare beluga whale with a genetic mutation that causes a partial loss of pigmentation, resulting in a unique coloration.
Bottlenose dolphins are gray.
“We don’t know if it’s male or female, but we think it’s a genetic mutation,” Hume said of Speckles, which has a distinctive dorsal fin and white stripes on its body and belly.
“This is very interesting. When we looked into it, we found that no one had actually recorded sightings of these brown-tailed dolphins in Australia.”
Georgina Hume
Speckle was discovered in September 2022, and since then researchers have been looking into just how rare a discovery it is.
Researchers have learned that this is one of only six cases in the world where photographic evidence of a beluga whale has been taken, and only the second recorded in the entire Southern Hemisphere.
“I’ve been working in this field for about 15 years on three different continents and had never seen it in person, so bringing the photos home made it a very exciting afternoon for us.” says Alexis Leavengood, an ecologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast. he told the outlet.
