A whale-dolphin hybrid was recently born in captivity in honalulu.
I then went to wikipedia and read about dolphins. Many examples of hybrid dolphins (2 species of dophins breeding to make a cross) exist in nature. The wikipedia article also mentioned that whales hybridize in nature as well.
Is splitting up these animals into whales and dophins actually incorrect? It seems that they are all interrelated - at the very least all species of a single type (all types of whales or all types of dolphins) or perhaps they are just one species all together, much like dogs who have great variation, but can all interbreed.
Do we have it wrong when it come to classifying whales and dolphins?
A “false killer whale” is a type of dolphin. “Whale” isn’t a well defined term. This is one species of dolphin that just happens to have been called a “whale”.
In addition to what Lemur866 said. The orca or killer whale is also a dolphin. The largest of the dolphins. Therefore, there are whales that are smaller than the largest dolphin.
This is a fairly old story, I read it last year. It is very cool that the Wolphin was fully fertile and had a healthy baby. Has there been any follow-ups to this story?
I thought dolphins *were *whales. Like chickens are birds. There are lots of kinds of chickens, and all chickens are birds, but not all birds are chickens. No?
Dolphins and whales are separate branches of the cetacean family. The Suborders are Mysticeti & Odontoceti. The Mysticeti are the Baleen whales or great whales.
The Odontoceti are the Toothed whales and probably what you are thinking of when you say Dolphins are whales. They belong to the Families Delphinidae. Other Toothed whales includes the giant Sperm Whale. The Monodontidae family which includes the wonderful Belugas and Narwhals. The family Phocoenidae or Porpoises. I think the River Dolphins are normally classified as a separate family. I know very little about these creatures.
Once more it’s fascinating how many terms from different languages have deceptively easy translations but different definitions. Our common word for whale (Wal) is synonymous to cetacean. I’d never have guessed.
Jim is on target, allowing for some popular-usage looseness. In traditional classification, whales, dolphins, porpoises, and all related critters are Order Cetacea, traditionally broken into the two suborders noted above, along with the extinct Archaeocetes (Zeuglodon/Basilosaurus, for example). (But there’s some recent evidence that makes the break not so clear as all that – sperm whales, for example, despite being clearly toothed whales, may be more closely related to the mysticetes than to the smaller cetaceans.
Multiple families, much as Jim suggests – and yes, the river dolphins are indeed in a couple of separate families.
The orca, despite the popular name of killer whale, and the related false killer whale, are in fact the largest delphinids-- much as the jackrabbit is “really” a hare, the killer whale is “really a dolphin.”
Whale cladistics is truly fascinating, if still a bit inchoate. And their origin is still very much up in the air – after several decades when it was thought they were derived from the Mesonychidae, a somewhat bizarre early group including Andrewsarchus, more or less hooved carnivores with enormous heads, modern cladistics sees them as splitting off from the earliest Artiodactyls, with pigs and hippopotami as their closest living relatives.
Ahh! this is exactly what I was asking about! The scientific community has figured it out… It seems to me based on thier classification, the 2 types are “baleen” and “not baleen”.
All the baleens are whales.
All the non baleen are whales and dolphins.
A better common naming scheme (it would seem) would be to call all “non baleen” whales and dolphins, just dolphins.
Then, All proper dolphins would retain thier name as dolphin, and all baleen whales would retain thier name as whales. Only the non baleen whales would be renamed dolphins.
They’re all whales sensu lato (like lions, cheetahs, etc. are “cats”). Popular usage restricts “whale” sensu stricto to: (a) the Mysticeti, or baleen (whalebone) whales*, and (b) the largest of the Odontoceti, or toothed whales. The line seems to be, “if it’s bigger than a rhinoceros, it’s a ‘whale’; if not, it’s a porpoise or dolphin.” But, as What Exit indicates, this is popular usage, not accurate taxonomy.
The smallest Mysticete, the sei whale IIRC, is scarcely larger if at all than an orca, but always called “whale.”
The other issue that the OP is confusing is how a species is defined. Hybridization in captivity has nothing to do with whether or not populations are considered seperate species or not. The populations must reproduce regularly in the wild in order to be considered members of the same species. There are all kinds of species that can be hybridized in captivity, and some that even interbreed sporadically in the wild (like the wolf and coyote), but these are still considered seperate species under the Biological Species Concept (which most vertibrate biologists subscribe to).
Another such term is Affe, which looks like it means Ape, but in fact means monkey or ape. In fact, I have checked in several languages (French, Spanish, and Italian, in addition to German) and not one has separate words for apes and monkeys, although they are clearly disjoint classes in classes. (But be careful, old world monkeys are closer to apes than they are to new world monkeys. This is quite parallel to the fact that toothed whales are closer to dolphins than to baleen whales.)
