News

In a first for the scientific community, an Indo-Pacific bottle-nosed dolphin was determined to have been suffocated by a huge Maori octopus somewhere off the coast of Western Australia. The young male, nicknamed Gilligan, was found on a beach about two hours south of Perth and appears to have tried to swallow the cephalopod whole. 

While the octopus may have already been dead, based on the autopsy, a still functioning tentacle had grabbed onto Gilligan's larynx leading to the fatal asphyxiation. While this unique scenario has never been observed before by researchers, and dolphins are known to regularly best octopuses, scientists expect this has likely happened more frequently in nature.

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