White-beaked dolphin news from Britain

This video is about white-beaked dolphins near a ship in the North Sea.

From the Sea Watch Foundation in Britain:

White-beaked dolphins … EVERYWHERE!

July 29, 2015

by Megan Evans

It has come to our attention here at the Sea Watch Foundation that white-beaked dolphins (Lagenorhynchus albirostris) have a been a common feature on our coastlines recently!

White-beaked dolphins are short-beaked oceanic dolphins found within the family Delphinidae (also the family of the well known bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus). These dolphins get their name from their short beak, which has a distinguishable white tip; although this may not always be the case, making identifying these dolphins a fairly difficult task! However all is not lost, as unlike their very similar looking cousins the Atlantic white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus acutus) they have a white saddle patch found behind a very distinctively hooked dorsal fin, white stripes, and are slightly larger at 3.1m in length.

Although white-beaked dolphins can be seen around the UK, as they inhabit North Atlantic temperate to subpolar waters, they are more regularly spotted offshore in the Southern North Sea. However, from April this year we at Sea Watch have received a number of unusual and exciting sightings from coastal areas spanning from Devon on the South coast all the way to Caithness at the top of Scotland (see table 1)! These sightings also included an unusual sighting near Southwold in Suffolk (see our previous blog).

Table 1. Sighting location, number of white-beaked dolphins spotted, and the observer

Along with letting us know about their encounters, a number of observers also provided us with some fantastic photographs; incredibly useful pieces of information when it comes to verifying any of the sightings we receive.