Bottlenose Dolphin
February 6, 2013 by staff
Bottlenose Dolphin, A group of sperm whales appear to have taken in a deformed bottlenose dolphin, marine researchers have discovered. Behavioral ecologists Alexander Wilson and Jens Krause of Berlin’s Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries came across the heartwarming scene some 15 to 20 kilometers off the Azores in the North Atlantic, as they observed the dolphin six times while it nuzzled and rubbed members of the group, reports the journal Science.
“It really looked like they had accepted the dolphin for whatever reason. They were being very sociable,” Wilson told the journal.
The dolphin’s unfortunate deformity — a spinal disfigurement, likely a birth defect, which gives its back half an “S” shape — could help explain how it’s come to be taken in by the sperm whale group, explains Science.
“Sometimes some individuals can be picked on. It might be that this individual didn’t fit in, so to speak, with its original group,” Wilson says, speculating that the deformity could have put the animal at a disadvantage among its own kind — perhaps it had a low social status, or just couldn’t keep up with the other dolphins.
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