{"id":341350,"date":"2026-03-21T22:48:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T22:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/341350\/"},"modified":"2026-03-21T22:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T22:48:08","slug":"can-whales-and-dolphins-crossbreed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/341350\/","title":{"rendered":"Can whales and dolphins crossbreed?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the delightful things about\u00a0crossbreeding<\/a>\u00a0between different species is the bonkers names sometimes chosen for the hybrid offspring. <\/p>\n

Think of the grolar bear (a cross between a male\u00a0grizzly bear<\/a>\u00a0and a female\u00a0polar bear<\/a>) or\u00a0pizzly bear<\/a>if the parents were the other way around and the liger (when a male\u00a0lion<\/a>\u00a0breeds with and a female\u00a0tiger<\/a>) or tigon (vice versa).\u00a0<\/p>\n

We know that several different species on land can interbreed, but what about animals in the ocean? Might it be possible for a whale and a dolphin to produce a hybrid \u2013 and if so, could there be little dolwhales, humporcas or narlugas swimming around in our seas?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Firstly, it\u2019s important to point out that the distinction between\u00a0whales and dolphins<\/a>\u00a0is a slightly tricky one. Whales, dolphins and porpoises are all part of a group of fully aquatic marine mammals called cetaceans: there are around 90 different species from the gigantic\u00a0blue whale<\/a>\u00a0to the humble (and highly endangered)\u00a0vaquita<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cetaceans can be split into two main types:\u00a0baleen whales<\/a>\u00a0(which have a sieve-like structure within their mouth to catch tiny fish when they take a gulp of water) and toothed whales (which eat prey using \u2013 you guessed it \u2013 their teeth).<\/p>\n

Dolphins fall into the toothed whale category \u2013 so all dolphins are, in a sense, whales. But not all whales (or even all toothed whales) are dolphins. To make it more baffling, several toothed whales with \u201cwhale\u201d in their common name are, technically, dolphins:\u00a0killer whales<\/a>,\u00a0pilot whales<\/a>\u00a0and melon-headed whales are all among these confusing examples.<\/p>\n

But, with that straight, could a species of dolphin successfully breed with a whale? And are any types of cetaceans closely related enough to breed with another?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sort of. A wonderfully whimsical named \u201cwholphin\u201d baby was reportedly born in Tokyo SeaWorld in 1981. Although the name wholphin stuck, both its parents \u2013 a\u00a0bottlenose dolphin<\/a>\u00a0and a false killer whale \u2013 were species of dolphin. The baby sadly died before it was one year old.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another wholphin was born in captivity in 1985: this time in\u00a0Sea Life Park, Hawai\u2019i.\u00a0Named, Kekaimalu, she seemed to be a perfect blend of her parents: larger and darker skinned than her bottlenose dolphin mother yet smaller and paler than her false killer whale father. Oh, and she had 66 teeth (bottlenose dolphins have 88, false killer whales have 44). Although hybrid offspring aren\u2019t always fertile, it\u2019s said that Kekaimalu had three babies of her own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the wild, false killer whales and bottlenose dolphins have been seen\u00a0hanging out<\/a>\u00a0but there\u2019s no confirmed scientific evidence of interbreeding to date. That\u2019s not to say it\u2019s not ever happened \u2013 perhaps scientists just haven\u2019t come across the hybrid calves yet.<\/p>\n

There have been other wild hybrids born to cetacean parents of different species \u2013 although it\u2019s rare.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Take the 2017 sighting of a weird-looking animal swimming with a pod of rough-toothed dolphins in Kaua\u02bbi, Hawai\u02bbi. The individual turned out to be a hybrid between a\u00a0rough-toothed dolphin and melon-headed whale<\/a>. Remember, these are among the \u201cwhale\u201d species that aren\u2019t really whales so, although this was a\u00a0scientific first<\/a>, it wasn\u2019t a wholphin.<\/p>\n

Or the skull found in West Greenland in 1990 that was later confirmed to be the offspring of a\u00a0narwhal<\/a>\u00a0and a\u00a0beluga whale;<\/a>\u00a0a narluga, if you will (pleasingly, that is what it\u2019s been called). \u201cOur analyses reveal that the specimen is a male, first-generation hybrid between a female narwhal and a male beluga,\u201d wrote the authors in the\u00a0Scientific Reports<\/a>\u00a0study.\u00a0It was, they say, \u201cthe sole evidence of hybridisation between the only two toothed whale species endemic to the Arctic.\u201d<\/p>\n

And there are also\u00a0flue whales<\/a>\u00a0(the sometimes\u00a0fertile<\/a>\u00a0offspring of\u00a0fin<\/a>\u00a0and blue whales) now roaming the ocean.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although there is evidence of babies being born between different species of dolphins and, separately, between different species of whales, there hasn\u2019t yet been a true wholphin confirmed by science. Which is a shame because the discovery of a narwhorca or a humpolphin would be pretty cool.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the delightful things about\u00a0crossbreeding\u00a0between different species is the bonkers names sometimes chosen for the hybrid offspring.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-341350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}