Humans all look the same to us (Image: Flip Niklin/Minden/FLPA)
AND then there were three: long-held assumptions that all killer whales belong to the same species have been blown apart by a DNA analysis of 139 orcas. It reveals that there are at least three separate species.
“These have all radiated from one another quite recently, from 150,000 to 700,000 years ago,” says Phillip Morin of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California (Genome Research, DOI: 10.1101/gr.102954.109). The three new species differ in appearance, hunting habits and diet.
Ross Sea killer whales from the Antarctic are…
