Speckles: Meet world's first rare-coloured bottlenose dolphin from Australia

Researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast have discovered an interestingly coloured fish species known as Speckles, a patchy black-and-white bottlenose dolphin on Harvey Bay, a Whale Heritage Site on the Queensland coast in Australia.

“It was near the end of the day, we were about to head in and we saw this massive leap, this massive splash so we thought we’d go over to investigate,” researcher Georgina Humes told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, according to New York Post.

The researchers discovered that Speckles is a very unusual piebald dolphin, with a distinctive hue due to a genetic abnormality causing a partial lack of pigmentation.

“We don’t know if it’s a male or female, we believe it has a genetic mutation,” Hume said of Speckles, who has a marked dorsal fin and white stripes on its body and stomach.

“It’s pretty exciting, we looked it up and we found out that no one had ever really documented any sightings of these piebald dolphins in Australia.”

Since the discovery of specks in September 2022, scientists have been examining how uncommon they are.

They discovered that it was only the second instance in the whole southern hemisphere to have photographic proof of piebald dolphins, out of six cases worldwide.

“I’ve worked in this field for about 15 years across three different continents and I’ve never seen it myself firsthand so once we brought back the photos it was a pretty exciting afternoon for us,” University of the Sunshine Coast ecologist Alexis Levengood said.