Burrunan Dolphin - A New Species Discovered off Victoria in Australia in 2011

A Burrunan Dolphin Jumping in the Sea

A brand new species of dolphin was discovered in the waters off Southern Australia near Victoria, Tasmania and the southern end of New South Wales in September 2011.  There have only been two more new dolphin species discovered since the start of the 20th century, so this is certainly an exciting new find. The new species has been given the latin name Tursiops australis by its discoverer, Kate Charlton-Robb, and her colleagues of the university of Monash in Melbourne in the state of Victoria. The word Burrunan in its common name is an indigenous word meaning "big porpoise-like saltwater fish" in the aboriginal  languages Boonwurrung, Woiwurrung and Taungurung. The Boonwurrung people have lived in Port Philip Bay, one of the areas where the Burrunan Dolphin is found, for at least 1,000 years.

The Burrunan dolphin was initially believed to belong to one of two species of bottlenose dolphin - either the Common Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) or the Indian Ocean bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) - in spite of some differences.- . However, a thorough examination comparing it with these two other species revealed that it is a completely distinct species.  An article submitted on January 27th, 2011 and published September 14th of the same year shows the unique characteristics of the dolphin from the measurements of the skull, the observation of external morphology and colouring and the analysis of its mitochondrial DNA in both old samples and new collections.

Newly Discovered Burrunan Dolphins swimming off Australia
Pictures courtesy of PLoS ONE

The Burrunan dolphin is smaller than the Common Bottlenose Dolphin, but larger than the Indian Ocean bottlenose.  It reaches a body length between 2.27 to 2.78 metres. The snout is small (9.4 to 12 centimetres in length) and stubby, the dorsal fin sickle-shaped as with the Common Bottlenose.  On the top and the sides of the head and body the Burrunan dolphin is darkly bluish grey, light grey along the side centre line, at the shoulder and below the dorsal fin and creamy-white on the belly, which sometime extends around the eyes and above the flippers.

Its head is more elegant than that of the Common Bottlenose and is broader and shorter than the Indian Ocean bottlenose, reaching lengths between 47 and 51.3 cm. The jaws contain an average of 94 teeth, comprised of 46 teeth in the lower jaw and 48 in the upper jaw. The teeth are long and conical.

The Burrunan dolphin has been provisionally placed in the Genus Tursiops.  However, the examined segments of the mitochondrion genome differ by about 5.5 to 9.1 percent from that of both other Tursiops species (the Common Bottlenose and the Indian Ocean bottlenose), which is more than with other dolphin species which are found in the same genus.

The total known population numbers only around 150 individuals. This is split into two separate populations: about 100 animals live in Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, where the metropolis of Melbourne lies; another 50 individuals inhabit the Gippsland lakes on the coast of East Gippsland in Victoria.

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