RESEARCHERS HAVE FOUND that Fungie, the famous bottlenose dolphin who made his home off Dingle for decades, was the product of crossbreeding between two different genetic groups.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Scientists at the Atlantic Technological University in Galway have analysed the genetic make-ups of 140 Irish dolphins that fell into three distinct groups.<\/p>\n
They confirmed the existence of an offshore group that lives out at sea and two coastal resident populations: the Shannon Estuary and the Connemara-Mayo-Donegal groups.<\/p>\n
The researchers used DNA taken from a wetsuit worn during swims with Fungie and found that he was a mix of the offshore and Shannon Estuary groups.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fungie first appeared in Dingle in 1983 and resided there until he disappeared in 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He was a solitary bottlenose dolphin, which is unusual for such a sociable species, and of all the solitary individuals studied he was the only one who was not 100% descended from the offshore population.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But like other solitary dolphins, he frequently interacted with humans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gathering DNA was a challenge for the researchers, who used a variety of methods to obtain it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Fungie\u2019s case, they used samples taken from a wetsuit worn by Denis O\u2019Regan, a member of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group who often swam with the Dingle dolphin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"RESEARCHERS HAVE FOUND that Fungie, the famous bottlenose dolphin who made his home off Dingle for decades, was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[157072,98660,27384,253916,4500,61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-599026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-atu","tag-bottlenose-dolphins","tag-dolphins","tag-fungie","tag-galway","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}