Fishermen from the Netherlands caught a Dolphin with two heads
MOSCOW, 14 Jul — RIA Novosti. Dutch fishermen accidentally caught in the North sea, an unusual Dolphin, harbour porpoise phocoena phocoena, with two heads, and gave it to the photography scholar, the website of popular science magazine New Scientist.
“Anatomy of cetaceans is radically different from the device body other mammals due to the fact that they are adapted to life at sea. Many of the things that separates us from the whales and dolphins remains unknown. Therefore, the discovery of a single case of diceglie among cetaceans in addition to the nine already studied gives us a lot of new knowledge,” said Erwin Companie (Erwin Kompanje) from the National historical Museum of Rotterdam (Netherlands).
Two-headed porpoise caught in fishing net is first ever found https://t.co/0Rh92AtAOu #case #twins #kompanje pic.twitter.com/TganKRiVDj
— Geekjournal (@GeekJournalNews) 14 Jun 2017
This discovery was made at the end of may this year, a fisherman by Henk Tanis and his friends, fishing in the North sea approximately 30 kilometres off the coast of the Netherlands. Pulling the net out of the sea, the Dutch sailors found that they could not catch fish, and baby sea pig with two heads (Phocoena phocoena).
This Dolphin was similar to the well known Siamese twins had two heads, three eyes, and one body with a “normal” set of limbs and organs. The fishermen were frightened similar findings and threw it into the sea, believing that such a “catch” is illegal from the point of view of EU law and the Netherlands.
Before to do this, Tanis and his companions took a few dozen photos of the Siamese Dolphin, and subsequently handed them over to the scientists. A description of the findings and these pictures were published this week in the journal DEINSEA.
As noted Companie, they were afraid in vain — the Dolphin, judging by the photos its fragile tail and dorsal fin, died almost immediately after exiting the womb. Fishermen shouldn’t be throwing it back — in the words of oceanographer, a two-headed porpoises have never met a scientist, and the study of the body of such an animal would help to understand why it died and what kind of mutation caused the appearance of a second head.
This discovery is surprising and interesting for the reason that these disorders rarely occur among cetaceans. As a rule, their females give birth to only one cub, and the mechanism of occurrence of the second of a zygote in their womb, somehow merging with the first, is still a mystery to scientists, which Companie and other researchers hope to uncover as the discovery of new cases of this kind.