A rare whale skull discovered by an Inuit hunter in Greenland has been confirmed by a Canadian scientist to be the hybrid calf of a beluga father and a narwhal mother — otherwise known as a narluga.
Scientific Reports/ 20 Jun 2019/ Mikkel Skovrind, Jose Alfredo Samaniego Castruita, James Haile, Eve C. Treadaway, Shyam Gopalakrishnan, Michael V. Westbury, Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen, Paul Szpak & Eline D. Lorenzen
In 1990, a skull from a morphologically unusual Monodontid was found in West Greenland and collected for the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen. From its intermediate morphology, the skull was hypothesized to be a beluga/narwhal hybrid. If confirmed, the specimen would, to our knowledge, represent the sole evidence of hybridization between the only two toothed whale species endemic to the Arctic. Here we present genome-wide DNA sequence data from the specimen and investigate its origin using a genomic reference panel of eight belugas and eight narwhals. Our analyses reveal that the specimen is a male, first-generation hybrid between a female narwhal and a male beluga. We use stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis to investigate the dietary niche of the hybrid and find a higher δ13C value than in both belugas and narwhals, suggesting a foraging strategy unlike either parental species. These results further our understanding of the interaction between belugas and narwhals, and underscore the importance of natural history collections in monitoring changes in biodiversity. In addition, our study exemplifies how recent major advances in population genomic analyses using genotype likelihoods can provide key biological and ecological insights from low-coverage data (down to 0.05x).
Observations From Members 
Arctic
