Delphinids: Spotted, Striped, and Spinning Dolphins

Pantropical spotted dolphin

The closest relatives of the common and bottlenose dolphins, which are perhaps the most familiar species to the western public, are those in the genus Stenella. Or at least, that might be true, because there has been a lot of confusion about the genus over the years.

It was first created in 1866 as a subgenus within Steno, the "narrow-beaked" dolphins, and contained just one species. It became a full genus in 1934,and by the end of the 20th century was agreed to contain five species - all of which had, in fact, been named before 1866. Since then, our understanding of genetics has greatly improved, and it has become clear that these various species cannot be so neatly arranged on a family tree as we might like.

The Puzzling History of the Clymene Dolphin

The taxonomy of dolphins is, as I've mentioned on a couple of previous occasions, a complicated issue. The problem is that at least some dolphins underwent a very rapid diversification in the not-so-distant past. New species appeared so shortly after one another that, from the perspective of the present day, it's very difficult to figure out in what order it happened, or which dolphins are most closely related to which others. This particularly affects the genera Tursiops (the bottlenose dolphins) and Stenella (the spinner dolphin and its relatives), and likely has some effect on one or two others as well.

If you look back at those two posts (sorry, this won't work if you're reading this on a mobile) you'll see that I drew up a plausible relationship tree based on the research of Kate Charlton-Robb et al, who identified the existence of the Burrunan dolphin as a distinct species in 2011. One of the animals you'll notice that I mentioned was the Clymene dolphin (Stenella clymene), and that I said in one post that "the spinner, spotted, and Clymene dolphins were all assumed to be related, on the not unreasonable grounds that they look much the same as one another..." Emphasis on the past tense, because the study seemed to show that, despite their visual similarity, they weren't all that closely related after all.