Nature Atlas

How Nature Works
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Species

Commerson's dolphin

Mammals

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Commerson's dolphin (Cephalorhynchus commersonii), also known by names such as jacobita, skunk dolphin, piebald dolphin and panda dolphin, is a small oceanic dolphin named for the French naturalist Philibert Commerson, who first described it after sighting the species in the Strait of Magellan in 1767. It comprises two geographically separated subspecies roughly 8,500 kilometers apart, one along the coasts of Argentina, the Strait of Magellan, Tierra del Fuego and the Falkland Islands, sharply patterned in black and white, and the other around the Kerguelen Islands in the Indian Ocean, larger and less sharply patterned in grays with a white ventral band. It is one of the smallest cetaceans, growing to about 1.5 meters, with a recorded mature female measuring 1.36 meters and 23 kilograms, possibly the smallest adult cetacean known, and it feeds on a mix of coastal and pelagic fish and squid, with South American populations also taking crustaceans.

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.